


lilacs and dandelions

by limerental



Category: The Witcher (TV), Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Curtain Fic, Domestic Fluff, Emotionally Constipated Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia, F/M, Falling In Love, Found Family, Getting Together, Half-Elf Jaskier | Dandelion, Hurt Yennefer z Vengerbergu | Yennefer of Vengerberg, Jaskier | Dandelion Whump, Pegging, Post-Canon, Protective Yennefer z Vengerbergu | Yennefer of Vengerberg, Soft Yennefer z Vengerbergu | Yennefer of Vengerberg, Tenderness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-27
Updated: 2020-04-09
Packaged: 2021-02-28 06:34:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 30
Words: 46,861
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22929526
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/limerental/pseuds/limerental
Summary: “The Witcher believes you’re under a spell,” Yennefer said, conversationally, drawing a sip from her tea.“I most certainly am,” said Jaskier to her in a warm drawl that Geralt recognized as the tone of voice he slipped into whenflirtingand frankly, things needed to start making more sense and fast before he gave into his impulse to do something rash and wholly unhelpful. Namely, chuck himself out the cottage window and into the sea.--Or Geralt seeks out Yennefer only to find her, of all unbelievable and ridiculous things, shacking up with his bard.
Relationships: Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia/Jaskier | Dandelion/Yennefer z Vengerbergu | Yennefer of Vengerberg, Jaskier | Dandelion/Yennefer z Vengerbergu | Yennefer of Vengerberg
Comments: 760
Kudos: 1968
Collections: Ultimate Favorites, Witcher, break the awkward come undone





	1. Chapter 1

It took the Witcher nearly the entire winter spent huddled within Kaer Morhen’s crumbling walls to admit that he was in over his head.

Or, more accurately, he had been soundly assured of this from the start but knew that fully admitting it would mean only one thing.

Nothing else for it. He would have to seek out the sorceress.

Come spring, he bid his fellows farewell, readied his pack, gave the girl a leg up onto the horse, and swung up behind her himself. She had refused to relinquish the finely-made blue cloak in exchange for one more suited to blending in, but the season was still chill enough that Geralt could swaddle them both in his own as they rode, holding their shared body heat between them.

She felt so small before him. Like a little bird, incredibly fragile and likely to shatter in Geralt’s clumsy hold. He spurred his mare on through the snowmelt and growing muck.

Yennefer was not so difficult to find.

She never truly had been or tried to be, given her tendency toward high-flung dramatics and a deep-rooted need to be noticed. He had seen this from their first meeting. A magical orgy was anything but subtle.

So he found her easily enough, north of Novigrad, living in a little cottage along the coastline. It had taken them a good month of travel to reach the port city, slowed in his pace by the girl and by the occasional diversion for coin. It took only their second or third tavern stop fresh from Kaer Morhen to overhear whispered rumors of the mysterious lady mage who had taken up shop by the sea, offering blessins’ and cursins’ if you could spare the coin.

The cottage looked, as Geralt approached leading Ciri on the mare, like an ordinary cottage. Constructed of rough-hewn log and stone, the roof shingled in clay with some bare spots here and there where the wind of the sea had torn them loose. Crooked, small windows with slatted shutters that could be propped open or pulled down to cover them with window boxes tumbling with spring flowers. A cobbled stone walk that led to the front door and another that wound its way down a rolling hill to a scant sand beach below.

But his medallion hummed gently against his chest, warning of enchantments, so Geralt knew he had come to the right place.

He tied Roach at the post near the door, helped the girl down, and raised his hand to knock--

Only for the weathered door to open of its own volition.

“Perfect,” he grunted. “Stay here with Roach,” he told the girl. Needed to make sure this wasn't trap. Knowing Yennefer, it would likely be a trap whether she was hostile or not.

The Witcher stepped through the door, expecting finery and smoke, expecting the interior of some elaborate throne room in contrast to the bumbling cottage exterior. Instead, he walked into the front room of a completely ordinary-looking cottage. A cozy, homely room with plain, wood furniture centered around a large hearth with a kettle hung over the fire.

Peering inside revealed no viscous, bubbling liquids as one would expect in a mage’s home. Herbs hung drying from the exposed beams of the roof, but not all of them were magical. Henbane and wormwood, yes, but also sage and thyme and sprigs of rosemary.

A curtain hung over the doorway into the next room, and he pushed it aside to reveal an ordinary dining table built low to the floor with patchwork cushions around it. A potted plant on the windowsill next to a rusted washbasin. A dusty bookshelf crowded with mostly ordinary titles, some books of poetry, some smutty romances.

The only thing that didn’t seem to belong in this perfectly ordinary setting was the mage that sat cross-legged at the head of the table.

She wore her hair in twin braids, the loose kind best for sleeping in, and a flowing, gauzey shift in a deep cobalt. Nightclothes. A steaming mug of tea sat before her on the table, and she looked like someone who had been woken from a very nice sleep and would rather not have been, her fingernails strumming along the table before her.

It _was_ , after all, fairly early in the morning, he realized belatedly. Fuck.

“Witcher,” she drawled, regarding her tea rather than looking at him, as though he was not worthy of the attention. “To what do I owe this displeasure?”

“I need your help,” he said. Which stung to admit but better to get to the point quick. This visit was for the girl’s sake, not his own. “My Child Surprise is--”

Before he could finish, he was interrupted by the parting of the curtains in one of the doorways beyond the dining room, likely a bedroom. The appearance of the familiar, yawning figure that stepped into the room stilled his tongue at once. He promptly forgot what he had even been attempting to say.

Because _Jaskier_ of all people stood blinking in the dusty morning light in the perfectly ordinary cottage, and he was--

His hair was dreadfully tousled, his expression muzzy with sleep, and most perplexingly, he was wearing one of Yennefer’s robes, a silky midnight-colored thing edged in embroidered, swirling florals. One that Geralt knew as Yen’s because he had many distinct and colorful memories of her wearing it. The robe did not quite fit Jaskier, ending just above his knees and tied loosely to reveal a fair amount of his bare chest and neck. Concealing absolutely none of the bruised love bites that smeared from his collarbone to the dip of his jaw.

He did not seem to notice the Witcher at first, padding into the room while grumbling about the early hour. He approached the mage easily, no hint of tension or fear, and as Geralt watched in dumbfounded confusion, reached to draw a hand along Yennefer’s shoulder and rest it there.

Yennefer stilled her drumming against the table, turned to him, and _smiled_. A quick, amused thing that was more of a laugh than anything but a smile nonetheless.

“Kettle’s still hot,” she said to Jaskier, and then--

 _And then_.

Jaskier mumbled a sleepy word of thanks, slipped his hand to gently tip her chin up, and bent to kiss her, chaste and familiar.

Then, he made to stumble toward the front room and the boiling kettle and promptly drew himself up short when he at last noticed Geralt in the doorway.

“Ah,” he said and looked from Yennefer to Geralt, tugging on the belt of his robe to tighten it. “Ah well, this is a distinctly awkward situation, and so I’ll just be uhh-- well--” He made to pop back into the bedroom, but the mage grabbed his arm and held him there.

“Stay,” she said. “If I’m to be up this early to deal with this, you don’t get to flounce back to bed.”

“Can’t I get dressed at least?”

“No,” Yennefer said flatly, then sighed, relenting. “Fine, go. Don’t nod off.” The bard disappeared through the curtain again, and Yennefer turned a dark gaze to fully look at Geralt. A smirk twisted onto her lips. “So, what were you saying?”

“... what?” Geralt asked, because he really was struggling to remember through the haze of what had just occurred before his very eyes. He stared at her, assessing, and his eyes narrowed as he realized what was likely going on. “Release him, Yennefer,” he growled. “From whatever spell you have him under.”

She pinned him beneath her gaze for a tense moment and then laughed, loud and clear.

“Trust me, if there was a way to release him, I would have attempted it ages ago,” she said. “Unfortunately, he clings like a burr.”

“I’m not a _burr_ ,” said Jaskier as he re-entered the room, clothed in a pale grey tunic tucked into butter-yellow trousers, feet still bare and hair mussed. He strode past Geralt into the other room to pour himself a mug of tea from the kettle and then settled at the table. “If I’m a burr, you’re a thorn in my side.”

“A thorn in the side of a burr,” Yennefer deadpanned, and Jaskier’s cheeks went pink.

“Not an excellent metaphor but I’ll work on it,” he said, and if Geralt had not seen their earlier, dumbfounding exchange, he would maybe not have noticed anything different about their bickering. But there was something different. Somehow, something had drastically and utterly changed.

“The Witcher believes you’re under a spell,” Yennefer said, conversationally, drawing a sip from her tea.

“I most certainly am,” said Jaskier to her in a warm drawl that Geralt recognized as the tone of voice he slipped into when _flirting_ and frankly, things needed to start making more sense and fast before he gave into his impulse to do something rash and wholly unhelpful. Namely, chuck himself out the cottage window and into the sea.

“Explain,” Geralt grunted. “Now.”

Of course, Ciri picked that moment to disobey his orders and appear beside him.

“Got tired of waiting,” she said by way of explanation.

“Oh good,” said Jaskier. “You found your Child Surprise.” He waved. “Hello, little Cirilla. You sure have grown.”

“Hi Jaskier,” said Ciri. 

“What,” said Geralt.

“Oh, come now, Geralt, you didn’t think the night you acquired her was the last time I performed at Cintra, did you?’ asked Jaskier with amusement as he blew on the steaming surface of his tea. “I went back at least once a year. Good coin and the presence of such a delightful princess? How could I resist?”

“You never said,” grumbled the Witcher.

“You never asked,” said Jaskier.

“I thought we were looking for the sorceress,” Ciri said at Geralt’s side. “Why is Jaskier here?”

“Trust me, girl, I’ve been wondering that myself,” said Geralt. “What are you doing to the bard, Yennefer?”

“What am I doing to the bard?” repeated Yennefer with a gleam in her eye that Geralt recognized immediately as _danger_. “Nothing,” she said. “Nothing that he doesn’t ask for, that is.”

“What,” said Geralt again. The implications of that were staggering.

“Your bard,” she said, a delicate finger skirting the rim of her teacup, the dangerous glint intensifying. “Is doing _me_.”

What followed was a loud protest from Jaskier that there were young ears listening and a retort from Ciri that she was old enough to bleed so certainly old enough to hear about fucking which only led to more scandalized sputtering on the bard’s part.

Meanwhile, Geralt’s mental state could be summed up with one simple sentiment.

“Fuck,” he grumbled.

He could only hope that it wasn’t too late to get on with that whole drowning himself immediately in the ocean business.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jaskier heads down the mountain alone. Yennefer follows.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i said it wasn't going to be a series and then it immediately became a series the end

That night, Jaskier headed down the mountain alone.

Or at least, alone for a time.

Yennefer soon fell in step behind him.

“What do you want?” he scoffed, but he did not have the energy for their usual squabbles. He half wanted to just stay quiet and let her pass him on the trail, disappear into the night without a word.

She didn’t pass him, and she didn’t disappear.

“You’re not with him,” she said. Jaskier glanced behind her. She had her thumbs hooked into the straps of her pack, fur coat swishing around her legs. Night was falling quickly, dusk turning the mountainside blue and the trail precarious, but he wanted to be back in the midst of civilization and wanted to be back yesterday. Preferably, to have never have left in the first place.

“Excellent observational skills,” he said and continued down the path.

“It’s getting dark.”

“Once again. Lovely to hear that you have eyes, Yennefer, but I don’t really care to chat right now.”

“You? Not care to chat? Seems highly out of character.”

“Not feeling particularly myself,” said Jaskier. He mostly wanted to fuck off somewhere he could order a drink. Or five. “And you’re high on the list of people I really don’t want for company right now, so how about you just fuck off?”

“Ouch,” she said. And kept following right at his heels despite his rebuke. To be fair, this was one of the few accessible trails down the mountain, but the feeling of her just a few steps behind still irked him. Though she didn’t try to speak to him again.

The dark sank in, obscuring the trail almost entirely, until suddenly a warm glow lifted over them, illuminating the rocks and twisted roots that Jaskier had begun to stumble over in the blackness. He looked back to see Yennefer with her hand lifted, a fiery orb rising over their heads. Its orange light illuminated her face. She was looking at him.

“Convenient,” he grunted and turned back to the path. The orb served as a lantern, bobbing above them.

“I don’t want to stop either,” said Yennefer. “Preferably would like to get as far away from this mountain as possible as quickly as possible.”

“You can say that again.”

“Also, I very much would like a drink.”

Jaskier glanced sharply at her, suspicious that she had been reading his thoughts, but perhaps they were just on a similar wavelength right now. Both tossed aside by Geralt of Rivia. Their shared fates would be incredibly hilarious if it mostly didn’t suck.

When the two of them reached the clearing from which the hunting party had disembarked, Jaskier found Roach still tied there, the Witcher not come down the mountain yet. He rummaged in her saddlebags for the few belongings he had left with her and stroked a hand down her white blaze.

“Bye then, girl,” he said, and the horse wriggled her nose against his outstretched palm. It would be a long walk back to the nearest town, but if he headed out right away, he might make it by the morning.

“Bard,” said Yennefer behind him, and he turned to see her holding the bridles of two horses. One, her own black mare and the other, Sir Eyck’s fiery chestnut stallion. Jaskier remembered the horse as his, because it had put up quite a fuss when they first rode in, spooking and rearing, the knight clinging to the saddle in a mostly piss-poor effort of containing the beast. “Here,” she said and offered out the stallion’s reins. “His rider has no need of him.”

“Nice try,” he said. “Advice though, if you’re aiming to kill someone, accidental death by hell-beast horse is maybe not the most direct route. Just a stabbing will do.”

“The horse is fine,” said Yennefer with a roll of her eyes. “Or would have been fine, if my noble escort had been less enthusiastic in spurring him.”

Jaskier eyed the red horse, assessing. He did seem to be standing calmly, chomping mildly at his bit. And it would be faster to travel by horse. He really did want that drink.

“Fine,” he said, taking the horse’s reins and moving to secure his pack to the saddle. “If I die, I’ll haunt you to the end of time.”

“And I’ll exorcise you,” said Yennefer as she swung into the black mare’s saddle. “Or bind you into a poppet and use your tethered spirit for nefarious purposes.”

“Is that-- nope, nevermind, I don’t want to know if that’s truly a thing.” He tentatively mounted the chestnut stallion beside her, resting a moment as he placed his weight in the stirrup in case the horse did blow up. The stallion stood quietly, head hanging.

Before he could say anything silly like _“maybe you were right”_ , he set out at a brisk trot.

Yennefer followed behind him.

With the horses, the journey lasted hardly an hour, lit by the orange ball of light that followed over their heads through the darkened countryside. They met neither man nor beast on the way and arrived to the village without incident. Reluctantly, Jaskier had to admit to himself that the journey would never have gone as smoothly without Yennefer there. To the witch, he admitted nothing.

The nearest tavern bustled with patrons at this late hour, and it was only as he hitched his horse to the post beside Yennefer’s that he remembered he had hardly any coin. Before the hunt, he had been in a bit of a dry spell, hoping to travel with Geralt a while to drum up a fresh bout of inspiration. Well, the travel had drummed up something at least. And no coin. No Geralt to spot him any.

Yennefer leaned against her mare to watch him patting his pockets and coin purse and rustling around his bag for a good long while.

“You know, you don’t have to wait for me,” he said finally, exasperated. “I don’t know why you’re following me around in the first place.”

“Mmm,” said Yennefer. “It’s entertaining.”

“Yes, yes, my suffering is highly amusing. Pity I can’t inspire that with song, oh no, just the suffering. Now where the living fuck is--”

“Looking for something, bard?” she asked, and Jaskier sighed, defeated, shoving things back in his bag with not a coin dredged up from the depths.

“I’m broke,” he said. “Apparently.”

“I’m not,” said Yennefer. “Buy you a drink?”

“Gods above,” Jaskier groaned, but he followed her into the tavern anyway.

* * *

Yennefer’s presence was not as infuriating when he had a suitable amount of alcohol flowing through his veins. Though he still didn’t know why she was _here_.

The two of them had cloistered themselves in a booth toward the back of the tavern, which was not really Jaskier’s ordinary fare, but he wasn’t in the mood to be at the center of things this evening. Or in the mood for much except for more ale. Mostly, he stared grumpily into his stein and ignored Yennefer, who did a healthy job of ignoring him right back.

As his sobriety waned, his moodiness climbed to new heights with the unfortunate effect also of loosening his tongue.

“Thing is,” he said to Yennefer as he leaned on his elbow over the table, gesturing dramatically. “I don’t really give a shit.”

“Assuredly,” she said. She sipped more demurely at her own drink, but the flush high on her cheeks betrayed her own tipsiness. "Most obviously."

“Don’t mock me, Yennefer of Vengerburg,” he said, pointing a finger. “I’ll have you know I don’t give a single shit. And neither does our Witcher.” He frowned. “Or no, what was it he said to me? Something about finding himself in piles of shit I was shoveling on him. No, that’s not quite it.”

“He blamed you,” said Yennefer.

“For all of it,” said Jaskier. “Lots of things are mostly my fault, sure, but not _all_ of it.”

“The Witcher has made plenty of mistakes of his own. With or without you to make them worse.”

“Thank you,” said Jaskier. “Wait, no, hang on.”

“Why do you follow him?” she asked suddenly, and he squinted at her, certain she must be up to something. She didn’t look particularly devious at the moment though, taking swigs from her drink and otherwise sitting with her hands folded together, her legs crossed.

“I don’t,” he said. “Not anymore.”

“Why _did_ you follow him?” she asked with a sigh of impatience. “And don’t say just for the inspiration. Not all of your songs are about him.”

“Ah, Yennefer, I didn’t know you were a fan,” he cooed, and she dipped a finger beyond the rim of her mug and flicked droplets of ale at him. Which, for whatever reason, Jaskier found to be about the funniest thing she could have done and burst into a torrent of laughter.

“Answer the question, bard.”

“Why? What are you after?” He couldn’t quite fight off the laughter, but his suspicions still lurked.

“Just curiosity,” she said.

“Scheming,” insisted Jaskier. “Plotting. Conniving.”

“I’m curious,” said Yennefer. “If it’s possible that we may be more similar than I once thought.”

“Pfffttt, highly unlikely. The two of us?” He made a quick gesture with his wrist between them. “Nothing in common. Don’t even know how we got here actually. I just wanted to come down that mountain and have a drink by my--” He stopped. Realizing. _I’m here to drink alone._ Let out another loud bark of laughter. It really was very funny.

“And yet,” she said, and he knew what she was going to fucking say before she even opened her mouth. _Gods fucking damn it_ , he thought, because surely he was cursed, he was being punished for something, some cosmic someone somewhere had a really poor sense of humor with him as the butt of the joke.

“Here we are,” said Yennefer.

There they were.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> accidentally goofed the timeline in this chapter as far as how long it would take to come down the mountain but that's chill, just ignore that, the show straight up forgot to age Jaskier so I can have little a inconsistent timeframe... as a treat.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Geralt and Ciri stay in Jaskier and Yennefer's cottage. Geralt has no idea what the fuck is happening.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i refuse to tell this story in order and i am having a good time

It didn’t get less perplexing the more Geralt saw of it.

Yennefer had agreed to help the girl, of course, but warned that it could be a slow process. Given that the fewer people knew she was here the better, she couldn’t risk seeking help. They were on their own.

“Take our spare bedroom,” said Yennefer. “The girl can have the attic to herself.”

Geralt faltered over the word _our_ spoken so casually, so serenely.

Yennefer smiled at him as though completely oblivious to his reaction, but he knew better than that. This had to be some kind of weirdly elaborate joke being played on him. Something concocted between the mage and the bard to get back at him for the unfortunate way he had behaved toward them during their last meeting.

It wasn’t a very funny joke. And one they went to a lot of undue effort to continue.

Life in the cottage somehow fell into a routine. Or, more accurately, Geralt and Ciri were fitted into the routine that its two occupants had already established here.

Yennefer woke early to stoke the fire back to life in the hearth and set the kettle to boil. The soft noise of her footsteps on the wood floors woke Geralt from his light slumber in the spare room (in _their_ spare room, his brain unhelpfully reminded him). He listened to her move about the room and then settle, only the steady thrum of her heartbeat to know she was there.

Not long after, as though roused awake when Yennefer left the bed ( _their_ bed), Jaskier padded into the kitchen as well. There was often exaggerated yawning, then the sound of a mug being pulled down from the shelves and filled with water from the kettle, his restless settling on a cushion at the table, leg bouncing. The slurp of tea being drained, the low murmur of voices.

Even without a witcher’s ear, the curtain between the spare room and the dining room would offer little barrier to the words being said. It was all mundane, morning conversation. The stuff of domestic life. _Weather seems nice today. Think I’ll cook those sausages this morning. This new tea I bought in the market last week is shit actually. Good day to be outside maybe._

Completely and ridiculously bizarre.

Then, quiet. The subtle shift of clothing. The curtain fluttered in a breeze from the open window. Through the briefly-parted fabric, Geralt saw Jaskier and Yennefer pressed close together, her hand on his jaw, their lips joined for a kiss. Slow and intimate.

Geralt had no idea what was going on. None at all.

* * *

Ciri, meanwhile, didn’t understand his discomfort.

“You keep making weird faces at them,” she said.

“I do not,” he said.

The four of them had gone out to the garden behind the cottage for an afternoon of training Ciri, but the actual training hadn’t lasted very long. The girl got frustrated quickly, not sure what she was meant to be doing, nothing much happening.

Geralt sat with Ciri in the grass afterward, teaching her to sharpen and oil the little dagger he had gifted her. Yennefer and Jaskier walked along the rambling garden path together, just talking.

It seemed that Yennefer, or some other mage at least, had occupied this place for quite some time, because the quaint garden behind the cottage overflowed with carefully-tended herbs and flowers. Many useful for magic or with devious effects, but not all. Some seemed to be grown just because they were pretty.

Geralt didn’t get it.

As he watched, Jaskier gestured at a bush, said something that to Geralt’s ears didn’t even sound all that funny, but Yennefer laughed anyway, touching the bard’s arm as she did so.

“You’re doing it again,” said Ciri, and Geralt looked sharply away.

“Am not,” he said.

* * *

The child thought she was very clever and astute.

“You’re jealous,” she said one evening, while he watched Jaskier and Yennefer cooking dinner together side by side, him cutting vegetables on a smooth board and her stirring them into the bubbling pot. Reaching over him to the jarred herbs stored on a shelf above the fire. Dainty fingers sprinkling in a touch of this, a touch of that. Leaning back to return the jars, pressing briefly against his side as she did so. His hand finding the small of her back.

The child was neither clever nor astute.

"Which one are you jealous of?" asked Ciri. "Or both, maybe?"

The child didn’t know what she was talking about, and he firmly told her so.

* * *

Of course, it wasn’t always like that. A lot of the time, their interactions seemed the same as they always had been. Snark and banter, cutting insults and a great deal of bickering. A fair bit of whining on Jaskier’s part and impatient huffing on Yennefer’s part.

Those moments were far more familiar. They made sense to Geralt. This was the dynamic he was used to. The Jaskier that made snippy, sarcastic comments, and the Yennefer that answered him right back with a catty sharpness. He could pretend for a little while that things were perfectly normal.

Except.

The snark and banter felt more flirtatious than anything.

The insults started to sound more like pet names.

The bickering was wholly domestic, the ordinary back and forth of two people who spent a lot of time in close quarters with one another.

The whining from Jaskier and impatient huffing from Yennefer were mostly answered with what could only be exasperated fondness from the other.

And the snippy, sarcastic comments and catty sharpness? Geralt had the great and terrible realization one night that they were simply foreplay.

Nothing at all made sense anymore, he finally had to admit to himself. Not a single thing.

* * *

“That’s it,” Geralt said one night around the dinner table long after the plates had been cleared and Ciri had gone up to bed, interrupting a particularly rousing show of bickering from Jaskier and Yennefer that had begun to divert into what could only be described as warm and coquettish. “What the fuck is going on?”

The two of them blinked at him, playing at being oblivious.

“What’s up, Geralt?” asked Jaskier. He didn’t sound particularly like someone who was laughing at him, but then, he was a performer by nature.

“This joke isn’t very funny anymore,” said Geralt.

“Joke?” Jaskier’s hand rested on the table very close to Yennefer’s. If he only flexed a finger, they would be touching. The sight of it made Geralt feel a little bit crazy.

Rather than saying anything, he gestured at the two of them together.

“Personally,” said Yennefer, slowly. “I think it’s very, very funny.”

As Geralt watched, she tipped her palm face up on the table, pinky just tickling the edge of Jaskier’s and without hardly looking down or pausing, his hand rose to swallow hers.

“I don’t get the joke,” said Jaskier, frowning at Geralt. He didn’t even seem to notice he was stroking a thumb along the back of Yennefer’s hand. “Am I missing something?”

Yennefer laughed so hard that she had to lean into Jaskier’s side to steady herself.

And frankly?

Geralt still had no goddamn _clue_.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Yennefer doesn't set out to follow the bard down the mountain. She also doesn't set out to realize she's actually starting to like him, but that's what happens.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i am emotionally compromised by the new amazing devils album but i still managed to finish this up for you folks you're very welcome

Yennefer didn’t set out to follow the bard down the mountain.

She could have disappeared in a flicker of atmospheric disturbance, buoyed away from the wretched place and the memory of the Witcher’s soft words and the dragon’s rumbling.

But portals drew attention she didn’t care to receive right now, and frankly, she was entirely fed up with magic as a whole at the moment. What good was the lot of it? Just mirage and so much smoke, nothing that could bring her any comfort.

So she packed her tent by hand, dispelled her wards, and sat a while peering down into the forest below, the evening splitting over the mountains, the distant smear of the sea.

When the bard stumbled into the clearing along the ridge where the party had slept, the camp was already cleared, the dwarves hurrying down some trail only they knew in pursuit of their reward.

He frowned at the empty camp, didn’t notice her sitting perched on a rock by her lonesome. Yennefer held very still, because she knew the Witcher wouldn’t be far behind him and maybe if she just kept staring pointedly ahead at the reddened sunset, he would leave her be.

The Witcher didn’t appear.

The bard gathered his belongings and paused at the trailhead. There was something off about him, and Yennefer couldn’t place it until she realized how silent he was. The Witcher’s bard spent very little time in silence, even when not yammering on, constantly humming or whistling or otherwise making noise, even if only with the restless shifting of his body.

He stood still now, his expression pensive, sparing a moment to look out over the sunset sky as she had.

The Witcher still didn’t appear.

Better get a move on then, before he did.

She gave him a head start down the trail but still ended up catching up to him before long. He struggled with the footing as dusk crept in, slowing down to pick along the trail. Only human.

It took him far longer to notice her than it should have. She wondered how he survived so long as a witcher’s companion with such a poor sense of his surroundings. She wondered why he was alone now, what had tightened the set of his shoulders, sank bitterness into his voice.

Yennefer didn’t quite care if he made it off the mountain in one piece, but she also wasn’t a monster. She didn’t wholly dislike the bard, found him more a fleeting annoyance than anything. One could do far worse in the world than be a fleeting annoyance.

The idiot was likely to trip and fall to his death in his haste to be away from the Witcher. A sentiment she shared.

So she sent up the light above them, incandescent and warm. Saw the wide-eyed confusion on the bard’s face, the ache of hurt there.

Followed him down the rugged slope of the mountain.

* * *

After finally downing that well-earned drink (or several drinks), Yennefer ended up half-carrying the bard from the tavern to nearby lodgings. Demanded a room on the ground floor, so she wouldn’t have to lug him as dead weight up the stairs.

The only room available, of course, offered one single, lumpy mattress in the center of the room.

“I followed him,” said Jaskier with a hiccup as Yennefer held him upright. “Because I was a desperate, sad, little man.”

“Oh hush,” said Yennefer and deposited him on the bed.

“I said _was_ ,” he continued, going somewhat cross-eyed as he pointed at her. “After tonight, I am no longer. I’ve been born anew. Like a uhhh… the bird. The one that burns up.”

“Pheonix,” she deadpanned, slipping off her pack and settling it at the foot of the bed. He nodded, vigorously, then looked a bit sick at the excess motion.

“Straight from the ashes, I shall--” He frowned, patting himself, and she realized he was likely fishing for a pen and paper to scribble lyrics.

“If you start composing right now, I am going to smother you,” she said. “This has been far too long of a day, and I’m ready for blessed sleep.”

“Ah,” said the bard. “There’s only one bed.”

“I see you have eyes, bard,” said Yennefer.

“Well I’m not-- I mean, I won’t try anything funny,” he said.

“No, I wouldn’t think so. Not if you value your limbs.”

“I do value my limbs,” he said, very seriously.

Yennefer shrugged her fur coat off her shoulders and slung it over one of the bed posts. Loosened the ties of her dress enough to be comfortable in sleep. Toed out of her muddied travelling boots. Realized as she did so that Jaskier was watching her, gaze hooded and inscrutable.

“Go to sleep, bard,” she said. She kicked at his booted leg dangling off the bed until he finally twisted to tug off his shoes.

“I really am done following him,” he said as he flopped back. Yennefer doused the lamps with a gesture and settled on her back beside him, hands folded across her belly.

“Mmhmm,” said Yennefer.

“I mean it.”

“Good,” she said. “He doesn’t deserve anyone’s loyalty.”

“Maybe,” said Jaskier, a melancholy deepening his voice.

There was a time he would have defended the Witcher vehemently and at volume if she had said such a thing. How strange, the ways she found they were now alike. Perhaps always had been.

“So we’re the same, then?” he slurred. She had the brief and foolish worry that he had peered into her head until she remembered what she had said in the tavern. “You and me. Both ditched by--” He paused to hiccup loudly. “Geralt of _fucking_ Rivia.”

“I ditched him,” she said plainly. “And I did _not_ say we were the same. I said possibly more similar than I once believed.”

“Right,” he said. “Semantics.”

“You love him, for one,” she said, and he cursed under his breath. “I may not be able to decipher how real my own feelings are but yours? You’d have to be half-blind and an imbecile to deny yours.”

“Yeah. Well.” The melancholy returned, a strange weight in his voice.

“Go to sleep, Jaskier,” said Yennefer, and he almost immediately obeyed. Started up a chorus of fitful snoring.

Sighing, she rolled to her side and curled around herself. Some sleep, with luck, would dull the sting of the truths spoken on the mountain.

Yennefer had never gotten on well with luck.

* * *

Morning light found the bard sprawled out and snoring and Yennefer curled alongside him, neither having moved in the night. She had slept far longer than she meant to, the sun long over the horizon.

The itch to be away had not waned, though some part of her feared it would get worse the farther she strayed from the Witcher. That it was drawing her towards him even so. That no matter how much distance she put between them, it would not be enough.

She rose from the bed and grabbed her pack. Woke the bard by tossing his own onto his stomach. He lurched into consciousness with a whoosh of air and blinked up at her.

“Up,” Yennefer said. “We overslept. Room’s only paid until mid-morning.”

Jaskier grumbled at her as he hitched his lute and other belongings over his shoulder and followed her down to the stables. The horses had mostly finished with their morning rations, her black mare, Sparrow, whickering to her softly as she entered. Sir Eyck’s chestnut looked half asleep, his lower lip drooping.

It took little time to tack the animals and mount up beside one another.

“Er… right, that’s it, then,” said Jaskier as he gathered up the reins. “Many thanks for the horse and the room. And the ale. And uh… the kindness, I suppose.”

“You’re welcome,” she said.

“See you around, then,” he said with something of a grimace.

And then, they promptly set off walking in the exact same direction.

A moment of awkward silence stretched, the only sound the horse’s muffled hoofbeats on the dirt track out of town.

“Where are you headed then?” Yennefer asked.

“Suppose I’ll return to my teaching position in Oxenfurt. They were loathe to see me go back on the road.”

“You? A professor,” she drawled. “You’re all of twelve. What do you teach? Nursery school?”

“I’ll have you know I’m a widely-respected master of the arts,” he said. “And I have my mother to thank for my boyish charms. She was part-elf.”

Yennefer blinked. Looking closer, she could see the tells that she had missed. The delicate bones of his face, his lean muscle, the deep blue of his eyes, the youthful turn of his smile.

“Another thing we have in common, then,” she said.

Silence awhile on the road as the town shrank behind them, a brown wood enclosing the path.

“Don’t know why I told you that,” Jaskier said. “It’s not something one can be open about in most company.”

“I’m not most company,” said Yennefer. “You’re twelve in elf years. I’ve been around far longer than you.”

Jaskier grunted as she spurred Sparrow past him.

“Where are you off to then?”

“I keep a cottage north of Novigrad,” said Yennefer. “It’s the same route most of the way. Ride with me.”

“I don’t get it. Can’t you just--” He made a whooshing noise and a spiraling gesture with his hands.

“Portal travel is a bore,” she said. “And noisy. I don’t wish to be disturbed for a while.”

“What and I’m not a disturbance?”

She looked back at him.

“Is that what the Witcher has led you to think of yourself?” she asked. “I’m not him. I’m grateful for traveling companions. Makes life more interesting.”

Jaskier stared at her, bewildered.

She shrugged.

“If I can no longer suffer your presence on the road, nothing a few choice herbs in your tea won’t solve.”

The bard swallowed hard.

“That was a joke,” she clarified. “You really think so ill of me? I’m no monster, bard.”

“To be fair, threats of castration and bizarre demonic possession tend to leave their mark on a man.”

“Fair.”

Jaskier nudged his own horse on to draw alongside her again rather than trail behind.

“You still uh… after all that?”

He gestured vaguely at his stomach.

A pang sank low in her gut. Wounds far too fresh.

“Seems it is not fated,” she said. _Never regain her womb_ , the dragon had rumbled.

“Fuck Destiny,” said Jaskier. “Makes for a very poor plot device anyway. Trite. Overused.”

 _Ah,_ thought Yennefer, appraising the man with a new appreciation. _I could yet learn to like this fellow._

They continued down the road together. Toward the coast.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this is indeed about to be an ongoing series and it's got me obsessively rewatching every episode with yennefer because i accidentally forgot half her later storyline i guess whoops what even happened during the last two witcher episodes? i don't know jaskier wasn't there


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Geralt overhears an intimate moment.

The first time he overheard them, he and the girl had come back late in the evening from a long walk through the hills. Ostensibly for practice in tracking and bushcraft but mostly just to abate some of her restlessness.

The poor girl had come from a bustling life of court and revolving company and, even without the frustration of not making any headway as to her mysterious nature, being suddenly cooped up in a seaside cottage with only three befuddled and bumbling adults as her only source of socialization had made her understandably stir-crazy.

So though Geralt didn’t love the idea of taking the girl out into the countryside outside of the breadth of Yennefer’s wards, where they could be waylaid and her identity discovered around any corner, he did so anyway.

She didn’t appreciate most of his rambling about foraging and survival skills and herbal medicine, but she at least attempted to. In between enthusiastic requests that they try the swords again.

It was going full dark as they approached the cabin, Ciri trailing behind him plucking twigs out of her hair and wondering aloud if maybe Jaskier and Yennefer had made that roast they were talking about this morning and if they’d left any for them. Geralt hmmed as he pushed open the door to the stables.

“Tend to the horses first,” he said. “Then dinner.”

Roach snorted from her stall, flanked by Sparrow and the dozing stallion Jaskier had taken to calling Little Sir, as a nod to the knight who once owned him. Ciri grumbled but did as she was told. He had told her many times _the horse makes the man_ , so did not do so again. You lived or you died by the speed and loyalty of your mount. Best keep them well-fed and groomed.

Geralt left her at her work and went to the cottage.

At first, he noticed only quiet. Darkness. The fire in the hearth had been allowed to burn out to coals early, usually banked high through the evening. The cooking pot above had long gone cold. No leftovers likely, then.

But his senses caught on something. Not quite a sound but the absence of it, a held breath. He concentrated to listen for their heartbeats, allowing the other irrelevant noises to shrink to the background, and found them. Rabbiting in their chests. Swift.

He gripped the sword at his back, strode across the room in a handful of sweeping steps, was through the curtains and into the dining room in a breath, and could have charged with determined force into their bedroom except that a strangled moan that sounded decidedly not of pain drew him up short. Immediately gave the flitting heartbeats context.

“God, _Yen_ ,” groaned the bard, and Geralt very very much hated that he recognized that tone of voice. That was his bedroom voice.

“Fuck,” he whispered. Had they heard him? Was he about to endure a far more embarrassing situation than he already was?

Geralt waited for the sounds to halt, for one of them to appear at their bedroom curtain, but instead of petering out, he was mortified to find them intensify.

The sound that wasn’t a sound morphed into something that was unmistakably wet and accompanied by breath gone ragged and gasping. A soft rustle of bedsheets, the groan of the mattress. Yennefer made no sound except breaths through her nose ( _her mouth occupied_ his traitorous brain supplied), while Jaskier grew noisier by the second.

More rustling ( _gripping the sheets in his fists_ ), the occasional squeak of the bedframe ( _an errant, involuntary thrust of his hips into her mouth_ ), small, slick sounds ( _her lips stretching around him, her hand holding at the base_ ).

“Yen, I’m not going to--” Jaskier gasped, and then squeaked as Yennefer hummed against him.

But there was the sound of her pulling back from him ( _a wet pop_ ) and then more groaning of the mattress as they re-adjusted ( _her settling over top of him, into his lap, her thighs against his hips, hand reaching back to guide him inside_ ).

“Not quite yet,” said Yennefer, settling into a rolling rhythm of her hips that drew sharp gasps from Jaskier. “I said be quick, not that fucking quick.”

“Can you blame me?”

“I can and will blame you.”

“Unfair,” he groaned.

In the darkened dining room, Geralt suddenly processed that he had been standing stock still for going on who knows how many minutes, listening to his former traveling companion and former lover have sex. The volume had begun to climb, mainly on account of the bard’s characteristic wailing. Enhanced senses no longer needed to determine what was going on behind the thin curtain.

“Is there any roast left?” Ciri asked, suddenly right beside him.

Geralt startled. “Shit,” he said and immediately grabbed the girl by the shoulders, marching her back across the front room. “Fuck.”

“What’s wrong, Geralt?”

“Jaskier and Yennefer, they’re uhhh… they’re busy fighting,” said Geralt, shoving the girl back out the front door and taking care to shut it behind them without a sound. “We’ll go for another walk. Come back later.”

“Don’t be daft. I’m not a little girl,” said Ciri crossly. “I know what fucking sounds like.”

Groaning, Geralt fought the urge to drop his head into his hands.

* * *

The next time heading back past dark with Ciri at his side, Geralt paused on the edge of the rise before the cabin, holding the girl still with a hand on her shoulder.

He cocked his head to listen, scented the air.

Now that he knew to look for it, what to focus on, it was almost deafening.

Even from such a distance, it rippled like a static displacement of the air. The little shifts and groans, the mumbled words of praise, the half-hearted insults and barbs, the swell of bodies fit together.

“What is it?” asked the child beside him, and he was jarred from his distant scrutiny of the warm hum that seeped out from the darkened cabin. Tightened his fingers on her shoulder.

“Tide’s low,” he grunted, gesturing down the stone path past the cabin to the pale swathe of sand below. “Good time to hunt for bloodmoss.”

“In the dark?”

With the moon obscured by clouds, naught else marked the black edge of the water but the sound of rushing surf.

“In the dark,” he said solemnly.

Geralt sorely hoped she didn’t press, because there really was absolutely no utility in learning how to blindly harvest the scraggly weed from the shoreline. Not much practical use for it at all. _Builds character,_ he decided he would say if the girl pressed.

She didn’t press and down they went to the beach.

For a good while, the girl fumbled about the craggy rocks that jutted from the slurping sand, fingering off bloodmoss, swearing at him low under her breath like he couldn't hear.

Geralt would have told her off for the swearing if his ear weren’t turned toward the cottage. Waiting to know when it was safe to go back, he told himself. Didn’t want to scar the girl more than she already was.

He felt more than heard it when it ended. The dispersal of pressure, the whisper of a sigh, the shared fade into sleep.

“That’s good enough,” he said to the girl in the sand. “Bring that up to dry. Then bed.”

The girl sighed and stood from her crouch, stretching, and Geralt followed close behind her up the hill.

The cottage stood quiet, a lit candle and fresh loaf of bread left out for them on the table in the dining room.

As the girl plucked at her bread, Geralt listened to the rise and fall of breath in the next room.

He didn’t understand it. He didn’t know if he ever would.

After the girl went up to bed, he doused the candleflame. Slipped into the spare room and took to bed.

Lying there, he tried a while to differentiate their heartbeats, which rhythm beat in which chest. Gave up. Rolled over to his stomach to settle into a doze.

Their pulse thrummed with the same cadence, chest to chest, perfectly in sync.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> now that i have this whole thing outlined, the tags have been updated! ot3 is (pretty likely) to be the endgame here


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Yennefer and Jaskier begin their travel together. It's not as terrible as either expected.

The first day of travel on the road was at no great speed, the horses ambling on a loose rein along the narrow trail. The weather was almost balmy for the north this time of year. By the height of the day, they had slung their overclothes across the horse’s withers, Jaskier his red doublet and Yennefer her fur-lined coat.

The sunlight slipped through the bows of the sparse trees, catching on patches of ephemeral flowers nodding in a breeze along the road, and it inspired the bard to remove the lute from its case to idly finger chords, his sleepy mount’s head allowed to hang low. No singing to accompany the music, just a flutter of the strings.

The piddling track saw very little traffic, so there was hardly any threat from bandits, no underbrush along the road for man or monster to hide in wait for ambush, at least not in broad daylight. Though it still wasn't wise to wholly fling away one’s reins for the sake of a bit of traveling music.

The bard carried on as though trusting that Yennefer would look out for him. Grudgingly, she did so. How the little bastard had survived so long in the world with such a scant sense of self-preservation, she had no idea.

As evening crept up on them, Yennefer diverted from the road and found a suitable clearing to rest for the night. They tied and fed the horses, then settled in to prepare camp. Her tent required little time to erect, aided by the enchantments that sang through the canvas, and as she tugged tight the last bit of rope, she turned back to see that the bard had spread out his bed roll in the dirt and was making to settle down.

“Bard,” she said. “Get in here.”

“What? In your tent?”

“You don't see any other tent, do you? There’s plenty room for the both of us. I’d rather not have to deal with your complaining tomorrow about the crick in your back.”

He eyed the stretch of fabric with skepticism but obeyed.

“Oh,” said Jaskier as he parted the tent flap. “It’s much larger in here than it looks.”

“Handy, isn’t it? Won it in a card game.”

“Probably cheated,” he said.

“Not wrong.”

“There’s still only one bed,” he pointed out as he dropped his pack and flopped in a chair by the roaring fire.

“And the bedding isn’t my color,” she said with a shrug as she folded into the chair beside him, legs tucked under herself. “One works with what they are given.”

She settled a bowl of grapes on the low table between them. Lay out a wedge of cheese. Poured out a dash of strong spirits into two crystal tumblers.

“Guess I’m not used to luxuries on the road,” hummed the bard, mouth already full of grapes, drawing a strong sip from his glass. “I could get used to this magic thing.”

“It’s not all it’s cracked up to be,” she said.

“Easy for you to say while you sit in your magic tent with your magic grapes while us commoners rough it out in the cold,” he said.

“They’re perfectly ordinary grapes.”

“No one carries _grapes_ as traveling rations, except spoiled sorceresses with very deep pockets apparently. It’s only hardtack and old jerky with--” He stopped short. Crammed some more grapes in his mouth.

“Saying his name won’t summon him,” she drawled.

“I’d rather not think about him at all.” He grimaced. “Wasted too much of my breath on him already.”

“Our mistakes are never a waste. Simply more opportunities to grow stronger.”

“Gods above, that’s a cliche load of drivel. Is that what they teach at those fancy mage schools?”

“Mostly,” she said. “If you’d rather I call you an imbecile and be done with it, that’s fine as well.”

“If all you’ve got for me is pithy sayings, I’d prefer the insults,” he groaned. “No originality, I swear to the gods. No wonder all you mages are such an uptight lot. You have no concept of _poetry_.”

“Who needs it? Why get hung up on florid nonsense when you could say the same in a breath?”

He gasped with far more gusto than necessary, hand to his chest.

“Because it’s _necessary_ ,” he insisted, gesturing with his glass of spirits. “Life has no meaning without art. I’d rather die than live in an artless world full of pitiable cliches. I’d rather fall on my own sword than stomach such a dreary life."

“You don’t have a sword, bard.”

“Have you been listening to a word I said? Metaphor! Metaphor!”

“If you’d like to keep squawking, little bird, you are welcome to spend the night outdoors,” Yennefer said but hid an amused smile into her glass, a buzz of warmth from the alcohol settling in her body. “Go back to the bit where you were insulting my place of education. I’m not opposed to that.”

“Goddamn highfalutin bevy of pompous bastards,” he moaned. “Absolute cretins. Intolerable hoity-toity whoresons. All of them.” Though she knew he had very likely neither stepped foot in any place associated with the Brotherhood nor met many other mages, she raised her glass in a toast and laughed, downing it in one go.

“Mmm, could I pay you to recite that bit of poetry before the Brotherhood?” she asked, dropping her thrumming head against the chair back.

“That’s nothing, my dear,” he said and promptly launched into a fresh slew of insults, each one more patently ridiculous and over-embellished than the last.

He stood from his chair to gesture more widely, stumbling with the drink, and eventually took up his lute to compose a bawdy ditty that explored in great detail the ways that each and every mage on the Continent could get thoroughly fucked, Yennefer flinging out the names of some of her particularly insufferable compatriots to add authenticity to the piece.

Finishing up a rousing verse about Stregobor falling into a nasty pit full of cockatrices or some other such foul creature, Jaskier flopped back into his chair with a breath of exhausted laughter, his eyes fluttering shut.

Yennefer had drank far more than she intended, the fire swimming before her as she tried to steady the sway of the room. When she looked back at the bard, his face had gone slack and serious again, his eyes half-lidded as he peered into the flames.

“What is it?” she prodded, and he offered a fleeting smile and a hum.

“You know I asked him to go off with me,” he said, not looking at her. “The night he went to you.”

“What happened to not sparing any more breath for him?”

“That’s all well and good but tell that to this thing.” Jaskier tapped the side of his head.

“Sleep, then. It’s late.”

It took a bit of fumbling to will their bodies up and to the bed, but in the end, the two of them made it there.

The air in the tent was stuffy with the heat from the fire. Yennefer considered it a moment and then loosened the ties to step free of her dress. Nothing the idiot hadn’t seen before.

He shucked off his own clothes, eyes diverted respectfully as she climbed into bed and tucked the thin sheet around her naked body. The bed was plenty large enough to settle beside one another with a wide berth in between.

“G’night,” breathed the bard as he sank into the pillow and right into sleep.

Yennefer stayed awake a few beats longer, turned away from him to stare into the darkness.

Falling into bed with the drunken bard could become a habit it seemed, though she had little time to examine that sentiment before exhaustion swelled over her and she slept.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> anyway fuck stregobor tho am i right?


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jaskier and Yennefer bond some more on the road.

Travelling with the sorceress ended up far more enjoyable than expected.

No sleeping out on the ground, for one, or eating either wet slop out of tins or dried nonsense that nearly cracked his teeth. There was cheese and spirits and fresh fruit and little, buttery pastries on occasion, though Jaskier had long given up on figuring out how exactly Yennefer kept all of this on her person and just put it down to miscellaneous sorcery.

Most nights, there was a fair bit of drinking on both of their parts and hollering on his part, composing new lyrics off the cuff about some ridiculous thing or another.

He was pleased as punch to find that Yennefer had an absolutely atrocious singing voice.

“You couldn’t carry a tune to save your life!” he laughed, as she glared with a menacing gleam in her eyes that would have terrified him into silence not long ago. Now, it just incensed him into further belly laughs.

“I cannot think of many circumstances in life I would be pressed to sing my way out of,” she said.

“You’d be surprised,” he said. “Happens to me fairly often.” Granted, the reverse happened just as frequently, but he wasn’t about to tell her so.

At a swifter pace, the journey to the coast could have taken a week or less, but neither were in a hurry to be anywhere in particular. When they crossed into villages, they stayed a few nights if the coin was good, Jaskier playing for tavern crowds and Yennefer offering her services to any who required a charm or a hex.

Jaskier scoffed at Yennefer’s surprise that he was as popular as he was, his lyrics hanging on the lips of all manner of strangers in most towns they came to.

“I should hope I’m well-known,” he said, sprawled in their bed one morning in a rather cozy inn. Neither had corrected the innkeeper when he offered them a room with just the one bed. They were used it by now. “Only been traveling the Continent for decades shouting my lungs out. Also, I told you, master of the arts.”

“Clearly,” said Yennefer. “Well, Mr. Master of the Arts, it’s your turn to pay for the room.”

“On second thought, I’m terribly unpopular. I am but a trifling songsmith with not a penny to my name.”

“Pay up, bard.” She narrowed her eyes at him. “Unless you spent all your coin from last night already.”

“Well, ok, listen, see it’s not as if I _knew_ she was a prostitute, but then I, well, you know, and I couldn’t exactly say ‘ah sorry, I made a mistake’ at that point, was far too invested by then and anyway so then she--”

“That’s enough details, thank you,” Yennefer said, shaking her head. “Only you would make purchasing a prostitute sound like you were doing her a favor.”

He grinned, rakish, a look that was likely ruined by his ridiculous sprawl on the bed.

“Oh, I most definitely was. You should have heard her when she--”

“I said enough details!”

The long days were spent riding beside one another on the road, Jaskier surprised to find that Yennefer mostly tolerated his constant, disjointed yammering and expressed open enjoyment of his impromptu lapses into song. With some exceptions.

“Jaskier, that one better not be about me,” she said.

The road had widened out through a sweeping meadow, their grip on the reins tightening to keep the horses from diverting from the rutted path to steal nips of sweetgrass.

Jaskier, who had been allowing one song to flow into the other just to hear his voice lift across the fields, coughed and cut off the rising notes of his most recent composition. The one that most decidedly had been written about said sorceress.

“Ah,” he said. “Well, in a manner of speaking.”

“Which means?”

“An artist can’t be expected to explain his every inspiration,” he said, waving. “Sometimes it just _is_ , Yennefer.”

“So it’s definitely about me, then.”

“It’s about you,” he relented. “And him. Probably mostly about him.”

“I see. Longing and heartache and lust and all?”

Jaskier grimaced.

“It hits different now,” he said. “I never expected anything to come of it, but I also didn’t expect him to…”

“To be such a giant cock?”

“Yes. That.” He sighed breathily. “I thought I was going to follow him to my death. Preferably at some ripe, old age.”

“You’d have died sooner and bloody,” Yennefer said. “Forget him. Your loyalty won’t be repaid.”

“I know that now,” he said. “Probably always knew that.”

He looked at her then, perched on the black mare, the easy way that she swayed with the horse’s walk, the sunlight touching a shine into her dark curls, the pale line of her throat. He thought, briefly, that he would like to continue finding out what following after her was like. A change of pace at least. Not as wholly unpleasant as he would have sworn before the mountain.

“Sing something, little bird,” said Yennefer into the silence that stretched between them, and Jaskier grinned, lifted his voice into a new song.

The horses scuffed up dirt with their dragging feet as the road curved on through the rise of the meadow, and the day stretched on.

He wasn’t following her, he realized. They were walking abreast as equals, side by side.


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Geralt realizes he hasn't yet apologized for what he said on the mountain.

Somehow, inexplicably, Geralt grew gradually adjusted to it.

Little moments of intimacy still blind-sided him here and there.

When Jaskier touched Yennefer’s shoulder while he told a story, a casual press and sweep of his thumb before drawing away or when Yennefer slipped a hand to encircle his wrist after dinner by the fire, their arms pressed together, her head resting against the swell of his shoulder.

But more and more, it became commonplace, the small ways the two of them fit together.

Geralt couldn’t help but notice, as he began to relax into this new dynamic in a lull of days spent together in the cottage, that a tension still remained. Not between the bard and the mage but directed at _him_.

They spoke cordially enough with him, shared their table, coordinated runs into the city for supplies together, helped to occupy and train young Ciri, but he began to realize that with Ciri at his side, most of their conversation was directed at her. Not outright ignoring his presence but not offering the same warm tones as when either of them spoke to the girl. And if Ciri was off somewhere, sleeping or studying or spending some time alone with the horses in the stable, the pair seemed to talk as though he wasn’t there at all.

He’d been too busy at first being shell-shocked by their changed relationship to notice it, but once he did, it was deafening.

Geralt may have been living under their roof and sleeping in their spare room and sharing parental duties with them, but he was being given the cold shoulder all the same.

 _Ah,_ he realized one morning at breakfast as he sat flanked by Jaskier and Yennefer at each head of the table, amiably keeping up a conversation that made no moves to include him. _We haven’t spoken about the mountain yet._

Problem being that Geralt had absolutely no clue how to broach the subject.

He would have had no clue even if nearly a whole month had not passed in the cottage before he realized the issue hadn’t been addressed, but now, the idea of bringing it up was more than mortifying. It was one thing to attempt to cobble together an apology and another to do so after he was pretty sure the suitable window for such things had long past.

Not to mention that the two of them never seemed to part, always huddled close or sprawled on one another or deep in loud conversation, and Geralt didn’t love the idea of trying to have a serious discussion about his personal failings that ended in being ganged up on by the both of them.

After a whole week or so of faffing about waiting for the right moment while his trepidation skyrocketed, he finally figured _fuck it_ and blurted it out.

It was late afternoon, dinner mostly finished and Jaskier and Yennefer falling into a lull of chatter across the table.

Ciri, thank the gods, had already gone on to her evening chores which meant she’d be off “mucking the stables” for another hour at least, though Geralt knew she spent a good bit of that just sitting and whistling on blades of hay and talking to the horses.

“I’m sorry,” he grunted, the words wrenched from him as though they caused him physical pain.

They did, actually, every muscle in his body tightened to the point of aching as though prepared to flee. Chucking himself into the surf still seemed like a very good idea. No guarantees he wouldn’t leap to attempt it if either of them didn’t _stop fucking staring blankly at him_ on either side of the table and say something already.

Infuriatingly, instead of responding to what he had said, Yennefer turned back to address Jaskier.

“The Witcher better not think it will be that easy,” she said, pointedly not looking his way. Jaskier hummed in agreement.

“He looks about to piss himself though,” he said. “Should we maybe let him say his piece?”

“How long’s it been? A whole month? He’s had plenty of time to do so.”

“Our Geralt’s a bit slow, dear. Can’t help that he’s working with the emotional literacy of an infant.”

“An infant? That’s being generous. Blocks of wood have more tact.”

“Not wholly his fault,” said Jaskier with a shrug. “He’s had a rough go of it.”

“So’s anyone. He’s got no excuse for being a cock.”

“He’s also _sitting right here_ ,” Geralt gritted through his teeth. He might just vibrate out of his own skin at any moment. “Is this display meant to demonstrate your superior emotional maturity? Or what?”

“No, mostly it’s for a laugh,” said Jaskier and finally fully looked at him. He wasn’t laughing. “So, you’re sorry. What are we supposed to say to that, Geralt? It’s been _weeks_. It’s been over a year.”

The casual use of “we” still floored him, especially when Yennefer only nodded, allowing the bard to speak for her.

“Don’t look at me,” she said to him. “He’s the one you were a giant cock to.”

“Quit calling me a cock. I’m trying to apologize.”

“Cock,” Jaskier said.

“Fuck.” Geralt ran a hand down his face. “Do you two have to make things this fucking difficult?”

“Yes,” they intoned at the same time.

“Fine,” he said. Turned to Jaskier. “I lashed out at you. I shouldn’t have. Didn’t mean any of it. My piles of shit are mostly my fault, and I take full responsibility for them.”

“And?”

“And I will try not to do it again.” A pointed stare from Jaskier, eyebrows raised. Geralt let out a full body sigh. “And I’m sorry for being a cock.”

“Good enough,” said Jaskier with arms folded across his chest. “I can work with that. Now, apologize to her.”

“For what?”

“Geralt!”

He sighed, going over the mental calculations again of how quickly he could be away out the closest exit ( _the kitchen window shove aside the potted plant and duck under the shutter, dodge the thorny rose bush underneath and run for the hills_ ).

“Yennefer,” he said. Turned to her.

She smiled in mock sweetness at him, a thing with teeth.

“I’m sorry for… the results of my wish. That you feel you are unfairly bound to me. I’m not sorry that I wished it,” he said. “And I’m sorry that I was dismissive of you and your desires. That wasn’t fair. Or reasonable.”

“And?” Her smile had gone softer around the edges.

“And I’m a giant cock,” he said.

“I intended for you to say ‘sorry for taking nearly a month enjoying your hospitality to say this’,” Yennefer said. “But that works, I suppose.”

Geralt sighed more deeply, some of the tension leaking out of his muscles.

“Thank the gods,” said Jaskier. “I’ve never seen a man clench so hard. You looked five seconds from bursting.”

“Shut it,” he growled, and the bard _tsked_ at him.

“Now, now, don’t ruin all your good touchy-feely work you’ve done here with more grunting and moaning,” he said, then, his voice gone tender, quieter, “I know that was difficult for you, Geralt. Thank you for that.”

Geralt grunted. “Yeah, well,” he said. “Would rather fight a fuckin archgriffin.”

Jaskier leaned to pat him on the shoulder.

“Yen’s scarier than an archgriffin.”

“Julian,” she warned, and he turned a charming smile her way. “He’s right though. I’m scarier.”

“Much scarier.”

“I’ll show you scarier.”

“That a threat, dear?”

“That’s a promise.”

It was then that Geralt finally fled with a mumbled _gotta go check on Ciri_ , across the room and out the front door of the cottage in half a blink, the closed door muffling the sound of the pair’s laughter that rose up behind him.

Geralt mostly didn’t know what the fuck had just happened, but he did know that when it came to these two he was most assuredly fucked in ways he didn’t fully understand.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> that's three chapters in one day because the Dynamic between these three just leapt out i guess. also who else has been emotionally compromised by the horror and the wild though?


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Yennefer and Jaskier encounter bandits on the road.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> content warning for some canon-typical violence in this one and a bit of blood/injury

They had hardly crossed the border into Redania, only a few days ride from their destination, when Yennefer stilled suddenly in the saddle, drawing her horse to a halt. The landscape was part swaying wheatfields and part dense clusters of trees, the road a muddied rut that the horses slogged through at an even pace.

Not far off, an overturned wagon rested on the edge of the road, one axle cracked and its contents thoroughly looted by the looks of it. Beyond the wagon stood a tangle of underbrush that led into the treeline.

 _Good place for an ambush_ , her senses hummed.

Jaskier had not noticed her stop, his lute slung in front of him to pluck a few notes here and there, humming more than singing. His reins hung loose, the big chestnut stallion, who he had taken to calling Little Sir, picking through the mud with his eyes half-closed.

“Jask--” she started but was interrupted by the whistle of a loosed arrow from beyond the wagon.

The arrow missed its mark, thwacking into the dirt beyond Little Sir’s hooves. The horse startled, snorting, dancing sideways away from the projectile.

The next arrow did not miss.

The shaft jutted suddenly from the flesh of Jaskier’s upper arm. There was a hushed moment where Jaskier stared down at it, blinking, and then red bloomed along the pale blue of his sleeve.

“ _Shit_ ,” Yennefer swore and leapt to action at once, pulling the air into a rudimentary shield to protect Jaskier against further arrows as she urged Sparrow to a canter up the road toward the wagon.

The shield would not last long.

Another arrow slung loose, whistling over her head, and she saw the archer then, squatting behind the wagon with another arrow already notched to fly toward Jaskier. Yennefer extended her magic, reaching into the very earth at the man’s feet and _tugging_. The dirt around him condensed, splintering into his limbs, and the man screamed.

“Yennefer!” shouted Jaskier as in a swell, more bandits broke from the treeline. Three, then four, dressed for close combat with stout swords and leather armor, the largest brute of a man bearing a massive ragged-edged axe.

 _Too many_ , Yennefer thought in the split second before they charged, mind racing.

A portal took concentration and something to draw from, too much room for error in close quarters, no telling what would happen if she tried to bring the horses as well.

Nothing here but churned earth for a broad stretch of empty ground, and _god_ she hated the way that earth magic tasted in her mouth. But she twisted her hands, dug, and the earth around the charging men’s feet became a cloud of sediment, choking.

A metallic tang stung her throat as they coughed and sputtered, but one of them lurched out of the dust and towards her, sword raised. Yennefer caught him in a drag of earth up over his boots, tightened her hold, held him until she heard the echoing crack of the bones in his legs and the man’s shrill scream.

The other men drew up short, still coughing, and she could see the moment they seemed to realize what exactly their lot was up against. Yennefer loomed as an imposing figure before them, expression dark with teeth gritted, one arm extended, fingers curled to drag the earth tighter around the trapped bandit’s legs, the other clutching Sparrow’s reins as the black mare pranced sideways, nostrils flaring at the scent of blood.

The bard’s shield fizzled just as the man slumped behind the wagon managed to fumble up and notch another arrow.

Yennefer swore. She had thought him too incapacitated to be a threat but then--

The arrow whizzed past Little Sir’s neck, and the horse reared high, Jaskier grabbing mane for dear life. In the spring muck of the road, his hind hooves slid, and in what was at first a graceful arc, the whole beast went over backwards with the bard beneath him, a crush of thrashing legs and churning mud.

_No._

Fissures split across the ground in the wake of her clenched fist. The men scattered from her, but she pinned them, mired them. As they lost their footing and fell one after the other, she swept her arm wide and buried them. The earth took their breath, crowding their lungs.

The archer died in similar fashion as she wheeled on him, grit and rock pulling over and into his gaping mouth.

In the quiet that followed, Yennefer slumped on Sparrow’s back.

With a pungent aftertaste settling in her mouth, ozone and iron, she slipped from the saddle on trembling legs. To move the earth as she just had sapped the strength from her body in ways few other magics did.

Little Sir had returned to his feet, legs splayed and snorting, sides slick with muck. Her eyes caught on the prone figure in the road behind him.

_Please be in one piece. Don’t be dead._

She limped to Jaskier, willing her exhausted limbs to _move_ already and collapsed to her hands and knees beside him. He lay flat on his back in the mud, one arm twisted up, eyes shut, his fine clothes a dreadful state. A patch of red wet his arm where the arrow shaft still stuck, and a trickle of blood ran from his mouth.

The arrow was easy enough to deal with, gone clean through with the head snapped off in the fall. She pulled the shaft free and pressed her hand over the wound, muttered something that would still the bleeding and begin to knit some parts of the flesh together. It would do the trick for now. The blood from his mouth she found to be a split lip, likely from the horse’s head knocking back into his face as he went over.

Her hands searched for less obvious injuries. Tested his collarbones and ribs for breaks. Closed her eyes and cupped her hands around his neck, pressed her forehead to his to sink a piece of herself inside to probe deeper along the vertebrae and the cord of his back.

She was no healer, and even then, there were no miracles. Some things once damaged too badly took more than anyone could reasonably give or endure to drag back into fullness.

She felt nothing but his heartbeat, no shattered bones or tears, so drew back from him to find him squinting up at her, the sun bright behind her head.

“Wuh?” he grunted less than eloquently.

“Don’t move,” she said. “Your back’s not broken, but moving’s not likely to feel good.”

“Back’s not-- the fuck happened?”

“Bandits,” Yennefer said. “Your horse went over on you.”

“Told you he’d be the death of me,” Jaskier said with a twist of a grin that turned to a grimace when the wound on his lip re-opened.

“You’re fine,” said Yennefer. Her hands still rested on his neck, and she realized belatedly she was stroking the pulse there with her thumb. She withdrew at once, straightened up.

“You look like you’ve seen better days,” he said, and she rolled her eyes.

“Magic always comes with a cost.”

“Of course it does. Sounds suitably boring.”

“It saved your life,” she said. “Be grateful.”

“I’ll be more grateful when I feel less like I got smashed by a horse.”

“He missed all the vital bits. Didn’t even crush your instrument.”

The fallen lute sat up on a dry patch of grass, wholly unharmed and unsullied by the mud.

“Neither instrument,” said the bard with a wink, and she groaned.

“There’s still time to rectify that.”

If he was healthy enough to be making wisecracks, he was healthy enough to get up on his feet, so she helped him do so with an arm slung around her, the both of them wobbling.

Little Sir and Sparrow had wandered off to graze but not gone far, and they limped together to retrieve them. As much as Yennefer wished to erect the tent right here and fall into sleep, there was no way of knowing if the bandits had a camp or stronghold nearby. Safer to push on a while. The both of them managed to clamber into the saddle with only minimal struggling and were off at a trot down the road.

Encountering no further threats in the next hour, Yennefer finally called a halt, and they set up camp a ways off the road. She did not have the strength to attempt to conjure a warm bath from elsewhere into the enchanted tent, so they made do with wet rags, cleaning off the best of the grime and blood.

The mud had dried on Jaskier’s doublet and trousers and skin, beginning to crack and flake off. He rubbed it free of his dark hair in a dusty plume.

“Well, this isn’t the sort of suitably filthy I prefer my days to end,” he said as he dabbed the corner of a rag along the swollen cut at the edge of his mouth. Yennefer rolled her eyes as she allowed her mud-stained dress to fall down her legs, stepping free of it and into the bed.

“Get in here, Jaskier,” she said, and he went.

In the dark quiet of the tent, he took up a low humming under his breath. Unusual that he didn’t fall right into deep sleep.

“Thank you,” he said after a while. “For not letting me get killed in untold gory ways by bandits.”

“That’s twice I’ve saved your skin now,” she said, voice deepened with exhaustion. “Definitely owe me.”

“Will try my best to be a loyal companion in return, then,” he said, and she laughed despite herself.

“I don’t need you to swear your loyalty to me,” she said. Her eyes drifted shut. “Just try a bit harder to stay in one piece. Makes my life easier.”

If they drifted closer together than they ordinarily did during the night, Yennefer could blame the image of the little prone figure in the mud that she still saw behind her eyes.

She woke in the early dawn to find her chin resting near his bare shoulder, twisted on her side toward him, him starfished across the bed. With her arms tucked against her front, they nearly tangled with one of his. Slowly, so as not to wake him, she shifted to more securely settle a grip around his upper arm, fingers curling to feel the slow and thrumming beat of his heart beneath the skin that steadily lulled her back to sleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i can have a bit of jaskier whump as a treat


	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jaskier wakes the morning after the bandit attack. And realizes something.

Jaskier woke to a mild throbbing in his head and a morning glow beyond the canvas of the tent.

He blinked, disoriented and not sure why, before realizing that this was the first morning since beginning to travel with Yennefer that he had woken before her. Usually, she startled him into consciousness with a shake or a nudge as dawn broke, and they would eat a quiet breakfast together before heading out on the road again.

Not so, this morning. Yennefer slept soundly, tucked closely against Jaskier’s side. He shifted to look at her, awareness sinking in that she was closer than usual. Her nose brushed against his shoulder, and her hands rested together against her chest, curled just so against his bare arm so that he-- ah. The line of his arm pressed against her very naked chest.

His fingers flexed dangerously close to the swell of her stomach, and he stilled, hardly daring to breathe. Yennefer did not sleep deeply, and she would kill him if she woke to find them in such a precarious position. Any moment now, she would wake and leap to scolding him.

Yennefer didn’t wake.

He looked again, saw the dark wrinkles of exhaustion under her eyes, the flicker of her blue-veined eyelids. She looked terrible, and Jaskier felt a thrum of guilt. She’d only over-exerted herself for his sake. He had never known her to oversleep and certainly never known her to… cuddle. Or whatever else this could be described as.

Yennefer normally slept in a fetal position, curled away from him. She hunched in on herself, hands tucked up against her, knees raised almost to her chest. As though protecting herself from blows even in the thrall of sleep.

Now, her face tipped toward him, Jaskier saw the ways that she looked impossibly young, like a little girl. She was older than him by decades and certainly no child, but the thought struck him all the same, the way her hands balled into fists against her chest, the slight part of her lips, the mussed fringe of her dark hair.

 _Oh_ , he thought and something strange slid through his body then. He turned away from her to look at the ceiling of the tent.

Yennefer had explained how magic worked to him as best she could, but he often griped over her explanations. It all seemed so _mundane_ , the way she said it, like magic was a system of bartering for goods and services rather than something mysterious and vast and powerful. He preferred the romantic notions he had always believed to her practical explanations.

“How does the tent work?” he had asked. “How is it able to be bigger on the inside?”

And she said, “it’s solar-powered.” Which was about the least satisfying answer in the _world_.

He didn’t understand how she could make magic sound so _boring_.

But what she had done yesterday wasn’t boring.

It had been terrifying, for one, how Yennefer could wield the very earth as a weapon, crushing men to death without dismounting from her horse.

But also.

He remembered thinking as he gripped at Little Sir’s reins to keep him steady, Yennefer’s shield rippling in the air before him, that _if I am to die at the hands of some simple bandits on a shitty road somewhere, I will have been glad that the sight of her looking like that was my very last._

She was resplendent.

A raven-clad figure on a black horse, twisting her fingers to drag the earth asunder, her teeth gritted and expression a taut grimace of concentration, but she was--

Well.

It hadn’t been the first time he had felt that odd spike of terror mixed with undeniable arousal. Though in Rinde, the fear for his life and manhood had soon overridden any desire he felt for her. _Very sexy but insane_ was what he had expressed shortly after, which had summed her up neatly in his mind for years.

But now?

She hummed along to his music on the road sometimes. Engaged with his inane ramblings with only mild exasperation. On more than one occasion let him finish off the last of a bottle of horrendously expensive wine. She was kind in ways he had not even considered, fracturing his vision of the cold and vindictive sorceress he had held as truth since their first encounter.

In other ways, though, she was the same old Yennefer. Stubborn as anything and bossy and quick to point out his moments of idiocy. She was still woefully unappreciative of anything that wasn’t strictly practical and constantly dashed all his whimsical ideas and romantic embellishments with extremely boring truths. And they bickered often, about anything and everything, about the weather and the route and what exactly the fresh breeze smelled like and what to have for dinner.

But also, she had killed men to protect him, their bones shattering in the vice of the earth she swelled around them. She had pressed her forehead to his in the wet muck of the road, her hair falling sweet-smelling and soft across his face. She curled warm and naked against him now, child-like and trusting.

Carefully, he extricated his arm from her hold and slipped from the bed. Inspected his pile of filthy clothing from the day before and wrinkled his nose. A glimpse into the mirror at the vanity alongside the bed revealed that he didn’t look much better, still gritty around the edges and his skin darkening with fresh bruises. He poked tentatively at the arrow wound in his upper arm and found only a pucker of reddened skin, no flush of pain. Felt a throbbing along his leg and twisted to find a perfect horseshoe print smeared blue and green across his upper thigh. Ouch.

The aching bruise reminded him that he hadn’t actually thought yesterday to check the horse for injuries, and he dressed in clean clothing from his pack, wincing only slightly more than necessary, before stepping out through the tent flap into mid-morning.

Little Sir dozed in the morning sun, his muzzle nearly brushing the forest floor. Jaskier had grown strangely fond of the big beast in the past month. Despite the nickname he had given the stallion, he was not a small horse, his withers stopping just shy of Jaskier’s height with a bulky head that dwarfed his torso.

“How are you then, Sir?” asked Jaskier as he bent to smooth down the animal’s legs and walked around him to check for injuries. He seemed no worse for wear for his tumble yesterday, which seemed wholly unfair considering the amount of very colorful bruises Jaskier was now sporting.

Nearby, Sparrow munched at undergrowth, tail flicking against settling insects. Early on, he had asked Yennefer if it was wise to leave the two horses tied so close together, mare and stallion as they were, and she had laughed.

“Sparrow is no ordinary mount,” she said. “It’s magic that makes her swift as the wind and sure-footed and long-lived and brave in the face of any danger. In exchange, she’s barren. Same as me.”

Her expression had darkened with her words, a twist of pain there. He found he wished dearly that he knew some way of easing it.

He knew so little of what went on inside her head, knew hardly anything about her at all, and yet, as he stroked his fingers through the muddied tangles in Little Sir’s mane, he thought _I think I would like to. I think I could love her._

The thought startled him, standing against the broad bulk of the horse in the soft morning light.

 _Oh fuck_ , he thought. _Maybe I already do._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i will pepper in a little all my horse ocs live forever. everybody gets a little immortality in this fic. it's what yennefer deserves.
> 
> oh yeah also Oh Heck it's happening, this is a real ass Love story now boys


	11. Chapter 11

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Geralt watches Jaskier and Yennefer together and maybe starts to get it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> disclaimer that I could not find a reasonable answer for how magic works in the witcher verse so I made it up and cannot be held responsible for errors because canon matters not in my heterosexual curtain fic

Most mornings, Yennefer took Ciri out to the garden.

As the season progressed, spring swelled the tumbled beds of herbs and flowers to bursting. They kneeled in a shaded span of packed ground beneath a gnarled stone fruit tree that scattered its petals onto the dirt around him.

Geralt hovered nearby during these lessons, leaning against the trunk of the tree to meditate or darn holes in his travel clothes or otherwise occupy himself with small bits of menial labor. He had rarely held still in one place for so long without seeking work, and it made his skin itch and his hands grow restless.

“Magic,” Yennefer said to Ciri. “Comes from the elemental world around us. Same as everything else.”

“I thought it came from Chaos?” asked the girl who kneeled before her, the knees of her trousers scuffed with mud.

Even bent in the dirt, Yennefer looked pristine, wearing a cobalt blue gown that draped from her bared shoulders and her hair done up in intricate braids. ( _Too intricate for her own hand_ , his mind supplied, having seen Jaskier braid her hair many times now, the two of them talking amiably as Yennefer sat with her back to him, his fingers twisting in her hair.)

“There is a spark of chaos in everything,” said Yennefer. “In the water that flows and the soil that is tilled and the breath of the wind and the fire that warms.”

Ciri watched with rapt wonder as the sorceress snipped a rose in bud from a nearby bush and swelled it to full bloom with a whispered word.

“Nothing can be created that has not been taken from somewhere else,” she said. “In everything, an exchange. In each release of energy, a well it is drawn from.”

In her other hand, she allowed a spark of light to swell, and the freshly-bloomed rose shivered and dried to a husk. As the energy dissipated, Ciri reached to touch the shriveled petals, and Yennefer offered it out to her to take.

“Balance in all things,” she said. “A mage draws up their power from the reserves of Chaos in the world. But something is always taken in return.”

 _Balance_ , Geralt thought.

The little cottage hummed with it. After his initial sharp confusion settled, he had taken to analyzing things more closely, watching with a shrewd eye, the better to parse it out into something that made sense.

The bard and the mage had somehow settled into a relationship of equal exchange. Trading chores, swapping who planned or made dinner which night, who cleaned the dishes after and who dried, who went to the market for supplies, who swept the front room while the other dusted the cobwebs from the stairs.

It was strange and easy and achingly domestic, but of course, also was not without squabbles.

Selecting fabric to stitch into new curtains for the front room, Yennefer preferred dark colors, burgundies and midnight swathes of black, while Jaskier harped on her until they went with something brighter ( _cheerier, less dismal, less like a house of the dead,_ he insisted while Yennefer swatted at him). Neither could ever agree on what wine or ale or spirit to pair with which meal and wasted far more words than necessary defending their preference.

Jaskier used the last of one of Yennefer’s decadently expensive bath fragrances, and no one in the cottage heard the end of it for weeks. Yennefer forgot to pick up the leeks Jaskier asked her to on her way back from town, and Jaskier moaned and griped about it as liberally and often as possible until she threatened to buy leeks and beat him with them.

But also, Jaskier sat on the cushions at the breakfast table to braid Yennefer’s hair in neat plaits along her scalp. When he had finished, Yennefer turned to dig her fingers into the line of his neck and work out the tension there.

“What’s got you wound so tight, little bird?” she asked as he groaned under her touch.

“Give you one guess, dear,” he said. “It’s sitting behind me.”

She pinched him just behind the ear, and he yelped and leapt away.

In the garden, Geralt watched Yennefer close her hands on a pile of snow-white petals from the tree above them and open them to a swarm of fluttering moths.

The beaming smile on Ciri’s face, he thought, was well worth any cost.

-

Most afternoons, Jaskier took Ciri down to the edge of the water, Geralt and Yennefer trailing behind.

As the days warmed, the beach below the cabin became more inviting, creamy sand edged by dunes capped with scraggy grasses. Jaskier was barefoot, the wind tugging at his loose tunic and tousling his hair, and he carried his lute by the neck until flopping down cross-legged along a suitable dune and beginning to pluck out a tune.

“No more tedious lessons,” he said as he strummed.

Geralt sprawled a ways up the dunes, intent on dozing a while in the sun, and Yennefer settled beside him.

“Has Yen been cross with you?” Jaskier asked, and Ciri shrugged. “I swear, that woman knows all sorts of things about magic and the universe, but she doesn’t know the first thing about _joy_.” He stuck his tongue out in her direction, and Yennefer rolled her eyes.

“Come on then, princess,” he said and beckoned the girl to dance and twirl across the sand, his lilting voice rising above the crash of the surf.

 _Joy_ , Geralt thought. The bard was wrong to say she lacked knowledge of it.

Their small life here absolutely _sang_ with joy.

He watched closely but soon lost count of the small, tender moments shared between the two.

The glimpses in the morning between parted curtains, Jaskier prattling on while Yennefer sipped her tea, flipping through one dusty tome or another. Their shared time in the garden, Yennefer whispering to the plants and Jaskier plucking her a bloom and earning a cuff on the shoulder for his trouble. ( _That’s Acontinum, you idiot_ she would say and pluck the deadly flower from his fingers)

On one memorable occasion when coming back from town, he spied them through the window swaying together in the front room, arms around each other, slow, the bard humming something in her ear.

Something about it made an ache rise up behind Geralt’s ribs. They were happy here, he knew. Happier than he had seen either in the time he had known them.

And Ciri was as well, fitting into their small life with ease. She often sat between them at the table, stealing sips from Jaskier’s ale, and both of them took turns bringing home trinkets and treats for her from town. Not safe for her to go out, not even at Geralt’s side, so they brought pieces of Novigrad and Oxenfurt with them. A bitter chocolate from Yennefer, a shining hair clip from Jaskier. Little things that the girl fawned over, half forgetting the darkness she still relived at night in shivering nightmares.

The bard crept into her attic bedroom to croon her back to sleep, and Geralt watched through the curtains of his room as Yennefer met him in a silent embrace at the bottom of the stairs after the girl slept quietly again. Jaskier tucked his face into her neck, fingers clinging to the back of her night dress, and it _ached_ with intimacy in a way Geralt still couldn’t quite stomach.

To witness the soft kiss pressed to Yennefer’s forehead as Jaskier drew away felt almost like too much, too raw, and while in many ways Geralt still felt unmoored and lost in this newfound world where these two shared something so different from what he had known, in other ways he was beginning to understand.

If not how it had happened, then at least how their jagged edges fit together now.

And they did fit, he realized, into something deep and true and whole.

On the beach, Jaskier finished a song with a held note and a flourish and leapt up to grab the girl by the hand and twirl her into further dancing along the beach, and Geralt noticed the moment that Jaskier caught Yennefer’s eye, the slow, unguarded smile that slipped onto her face.

Yes, he could see it clearly reflected in the way she looked at the bard. Yennefer knew a few things about joy.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> it's not fair how much i love outsider perspective of these two assholes being in love


	12. Chapter 12

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jaskier is shocked to find that Yennefer has grown fond of him. Yennefer is surprised to find that fondness runs deeper than she expected.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> would just like to say here that i am endlessly thankful for the kind words and engagement this fic has received. all of you are very cool and have good taste

With the horses watered and comfortable, Jaskier slipped back into the enchanted tent to find Yennefer awake and seated at the vanity, brushing the tangles from her dark spill of hair. She met his gaze in the mirror as he entered, and in the wake of his realization outside, he found himself noticing small details that may have otherwise escaped him. The fine frizz of hair along her scalp, the sleepy puff around her eyes.

He didn’t realize he was standing there in the opening of the tent smiling like an idiot for an indeterminate length of time until she quirked a brow at him in the mirror, a small smile tugging at the edges of her own mouth.

“Morning,” he said.

“Mmm,” she hummed, sounding as tired as she looked.

“Do you get this exhausted every time?” he asked as he finally strode across the room to flop back on the bed. “Seems impractical.”

“Not every time. Usually not,” she said. Looking closer, he noticed the tremble of her arm on the downstroke as she dragged the brush slowly through her hair. “Certain magics are more potent if fueled by emotions. But that energy has to come from somewhere.”

“Emotions?”

“Thought you were dead," She shrugged.

He blinked at her, blind-sided by the candid admission. He had been in plenty of near-death situations before. That type of thing came part and parcel with the company he kept and a life on the road. Usually it took far more pestering and needling and sheer luck to get even a mumbled _don’t be so fucking stupid next time_ from his previous travel companion.

A silly grin split his face.

“Ooooooh,” Jaskier cooed, voice rising in pitch. “Yennefer of Vengerberg _cares_.”

“Yennefer of Vengerberg could finish the job those bandits started,” she said flatly. Now that was more the reaction he was used to. He could work with that.

“I’d think not! Because she spent all that energy and effort protecting me. Wouldn’t want all that to go to waste.”

“Or maybe she just is looking forward to throttling you herself.”

“Or she gives a shit about me, hmm?” His eyes gleamed, readying to tease and prod her for the rest of the day. He could leave well enough alone and perhaps not risk being shouted at and scorned in the near future, but where was the fun in that? “The most illustrious and powerful Yennefer of Vengerberg gives a shit about a lowly travelling minstrel such as myself.”

“I do,” said Yennefer, setting down her brush and turning to look at him over her shoulder. “Is that so surprising?”

Oh. Again said so bluntly as to have no other interpretation except truth.

“Frankly, yes,” he said.

“We’ve been traveling together for weeks now,” she said. “Is it so shocking that I've grown fond of you? I would have killed you in the first hour if I truly found your presence repulsive. You expected me to stand by and let you meet your grisly end?”

“No,” he said. “Just didn’t expect you to admit so easily that you-- well, that we’re--”

“That you're a friend?” she asked. “The Witcher has truly warped your sense of the world. Not all of us are so cowardly.” Her turn now for a gleam of amusement in her eyes. She turned back to the vanity to dab a touch of concealing cream along the dark circles beneath her eyes. “I can admit when something pleases me.”

“Ah,” he said, feeling warm suddenly, his hands twitching where they folded across his stomach. He caught her watching him in the mirror, that small, amused smile still twitching on her lips.

Yennefer capped her bottle of cream and set it back on the vanity with a clack, the sudden volume of which made him jump.

“Best be ready and on the road again,” she said. “We should reach my cottage in another two days if we don’t dally about any longer.”

“Right,” he said, leaping from the bed at once to begin fussing with his belongings.

He could almost taste the salt-spray off the waves and feel the breath of the breeze.

Soon, the coast.

* * *

In their last few days of travel, their pace quickened and the road grew heavier with traffic.

The track converged with a wider thoroughfare packed flat by the bustle of horse and wagon converging on Novigrad to the south. No fear of further bandit excitement here, for troops of guards marched in regular intervals along the route, stopping to ask after their destination and where they had set out from.

Jaskier seemed incensed into an even more excitable fervor by the looming promise of civilization close at hand, and he waved gaily at every traveler they came alongside, uttering a sunny _”hullo! lovely weather we’re having, my friend. can almost smell that ocean breeze!”_ Even Little Sir picked up on his gleeful mood and walked with a prance to his step, arching his great, crested neck and snorting.

Yennefer looked on, not bothering to hide her fond amusement.

He rode ahead of her most of the day, either bellowing songs he seemed to invent line by line as his voice rose into the too-blue sky or yammering on without end, but sometimes, he would look back at her with a beaming grin that felt like a thing just for her.

Not shared with passing strangers or inspired by the rousing, coastal wind but widening at the sight of her following behind.

She had not realized the depth of her strange and growing fondness for the ridiculous man until speaking it out loud, and his shock that his presence could be tolerated, let alone enjoyed, only encouraged her to further reassure him. The more she thought on the things she had learned about Jaskier in their weeks of travel, the more it simply made sense.

Her hunch had been correct the night they came down the mountain together. They shared far more similarities than not, and even where they differed, the contrast felt complementary rather than jarring.

Beyond their attraction to Geralt of Rivia, both she and Jaskier held similar preferences as to leisure and travel and creature comforts. He refused to settle for anything but the choicest of wines or ales, preferred to end his days indulging in a sprawl before the fire eating fresh fruit and swirling a drink in his raised glass, and invested the same level of care each morning into his appearance as she did, the two of them preening before the mirror side by side.

For all his inane chatter, he was surprisingly shrewd and able to talk at length about topics she would have thought beyond him. He had studied all manner of subjects in his years at the Academy in Oxenfurt and had more than just a cursory knowledge of topics from history to herbalism, astronomy to economics, in some areas eclipsing her own.

Jaskier carried more of a tendency toward melodrama, but Yennefer could not deny her own lust for excitement, action, and theatrics, a tendency that Tissaia and the Brotherhood had done their level best to throttle from her with no lasting success.

The bard flounced about everywhere and anywhere with the surety of a choreographed routine meant to draw as much attention to his person as possible, and though their methods were very different, Yennefer could not deny that she endeavored toward the same outcome.

And though Jaskier often appeared foppish and lackadaisical and overall harmless, he could launch into spewing vitriol and embellished threats in half a breath. Threats that she no longer doubted would be carried through with vigorous intent.

Like Yennefer, he did not soften his punches with unnecessary pleasantry. If pressed, he cut right to the brutal heart of the matter.

And.

As they traveled, she found herself thinking also that there were aspects of the bard that she only wished she could begin to emulate.

Though he seemed shallow, self-absorbed, and flighty, she knew at his heart he was endlessly loyal, drawn to deep empathy for the plights and emotions of others, and prone to a remarkable tenderness that softened his voice to something that stirred a warm hum through her body. Adept at comfort, intelligent in the matters of the heart, and able to offer words to quell anxieties she had not even recognized in herself.

Yennefer wished she could reflect even a fragment of that unabashed kindness. She wished to shield him from a world that would deign to ruin him. She wished to know him in fullness, if only to better understand how he kept that gentleness alongside his venom, how he could love so intently and gratuitously without wearing thin.

 _Oh_.

She wished to be loved by him.

To be a thing worthy of the warmth in his voice and the steadiness of his devotion. With the same dedicated and careful attention as he poured into song. With the same unabashed and unfettered joy that had him charging forward along the road ahead of her toward his next great adventure.

“Where have you been off to?” he said as he slowed Little Sir’s pace to allow her to pull alongside. “You seem distracted.”

“Nowhere,” she said, and she saw the way his chestnut hair gleamed in the afternoon sun, his lips again pulling into that smile that tugged strangely at something in her belly. “Just tired.”

“I wonder if anything’s changed at Oxenfurt,” he wondered aloud. “Not long to go now."

Oh.

A realization sank into her then.

He had never said, as such, that he aimed to stay with her when their journey concluded. She had not asked him to, she realized, only to travel with her on the way. He would go farther on down the road to board at Oxenfurt among his fellows, while she took up residence in her dusty cottage alone.

This day or so of travel would be their last time spent together unless their paths happened to cross again. She knew they would, of course, but this particular stretch of shared time between them was coming to an end.

Jaskier would wish her well, perhaps offer an embrace if he felt emboldened enough, and the two of them would part ways.

How strange to find herself missing him before he had gone. How strange to look at him beside her and realize she could hardly remember thinking ill of him, could hardly recollect what her initial impressions of him had been at all.

 _Oh. I do suppose I love him,_ she thought as the road led them on toward the coast.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this is the softest tooth-rotting fluffy shit i've ever written i swear to the gods


	13. Chapter 13

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Geralt tries to get the story of how it all happened out of Jaskier and Yennefer. Eventually, they tell him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i have squinted at witcherverse maps for so long i am pretty sure i will remember these place names until i die. there are no perks to this except that i can now tell when other fic writers have no idea what they're doing either and that is very gratifying

It took months before Geralt found the courage and appropriate timing to finally ask how it had happened.

He asked the bard and the mage on separate occasions, a strangely difficult feat these days what with how they seemed attached at the hip.

Geralt might have been beginning to understand why and how this bizarre and inexplicable relationship worked, but he still couldn’t begin to imagine how the two of them had come to his point.

He asked Jaskier first, because he figured that the man’s inability to shut the fuck up may make him more likely than Yennefer to speak openly without too much prodding. This assumption wasn’t incorrect, but the bard still couldn’t manage to speak plainly and concisely about it. Oh no, the way he carried on when pressed had Geralt worried he would break into lyrical braying at any given moment, babbling into metaphor and soaring prose and nothing else that was of much help to Geralt.

He finally cut his losses and admitted that he would have to ask Yennefer as well if he had any hope of understanding this. And he found he did want to. Understand this.

Yennefer was, as expected, less forthcoming and more driven to turn the question back on him, all glinty eyes and cunning smirk as she asked _why do you want to know, Geralt?_ As though his honest answer of _I want to understand what went wrong between us that went right between you and him_ would not immediately be twisted as a weapon against him, a fresh attempt to crack him open and peer inside.

After numerous half-answers and stilted conversations, Geralt was finally able to piece some of it together.

It had happened like this:

Jaskier and Yennefer travelled together, after the mountain.

Rode down in a roundabout way through Caingorn and Redania and arrived at the cottage north of Novigrad after a month in one another’s company, having gained an appreciation for the other that hadn’t existed before.

“And then we parted ways,” said Jaskier.

“For a little while,” said Yennefer.

Jaskier returned to his teaching post at the Academy, and Yennefer kept to herself by the sea.

“It was hardly a week before I was riding back up north to her though,” said Jaskier, voice stirring with whimsy. “She lent me her spare room.”

Except, the first night sleeping in her cottage, the bard spent half the night lying awake in the spare room, the same as he had spent his past nights at the boarding house in Oxenfurt. He finally roused himself, pulled his thin blanket over his shoulders, and cursed his own dreadful weakness as he slipped through the curtains into Yennefer’s bedroom.

She too lay awake.

“So that’s when it happened,” said Geralt, and Yennefer huffed.

“What happened then was we slept together,” she said. “But not like that. Just as we had on the road.”

Close enough to hear the other’s breath rise and fall with sleep and to reach out and touch with the stretch of an arm. Neither reached out to touch. Simply settled into the quiet comfort of lying beside one another in the darkened room, sleeping easily that night and the many nights after.

“But when did it-- I mean, when did you-- Ah, fuck,” Geralt grunted.

“Is that you asking when we had sex or was that just another incoherent expletive?” asked Jaskier.

“I don’t think that’s any of your business,” said Yennefer.

“If you’d allow me to fetch my lute, I could tell you every detail,” said Jaskier.

* * *

It happened like this:

Jaskier and Yennefer woke together in the early mornings before dawn and stumbled from the bed that was steadily becoming _theirs_ to brew tea and sit together on the floor mumbling sleepily.

Jaskier went out into the morning to tack up Little Sir and ride to Oxenfurt for a day of teaching or sometimes to Novigrad to prepare for a banquet or other such performance. Some days, Yennefer gave him a list of things to pick up at the market, though he frequently forgot one thing or another on the list and had to deal with her peeved ire. The road along the coast to the cottage was long and winding, and he spoke to Little Sir as he spent lazy afternoon rides back from town looking out over the sea.

Yennefer worked preparing charms and concoctions and herbal teas for discerning customers nearby, setting up a little stand in the market in Novigrad some mornings to read fortunes or drawing in consultations from across the Continent. She pressed lists into his hand of things for Jaskier to pick up from the market knowing that he would forget half of them. Only put on her air of disdain when he did so because of the distinct hilarity she found in his sheepish, stuttering apologies.

Jaskier, eventually, coaxed her down to the edge of the water.

Yennefer did not prefer the grit of sand and blaze of the sun and cold touch of the surf against her legs, but she went.

“If you didn’t wear so much black,” insisted Jaskier, plucking at the sleeve of her dark, rippling gown, “maybe you wouldn’t overheat so badly.”

“I’m not overheating,” said Yennefer, as she sweltered.

They split cooking duties at first and then shifted to work side by side, Jaskier always intent on procuring new recipes from his numerous acquaintances and Yennefer deigning to try anything once.

Neither were terribly good at cooking.

Neither had much experience in home-making in general, never staying in one place long, never keeping to the same crowds or allowing a routine to settle.

For Jaskier, there was the feeling that to settle would be to miss out, to be left behind, or to leave nothing behind in the world, at least nothing of worth.

For Yennefer, there was the fear that to slow and allow herself to become attached to something would only inevitably end in disappointment and loss.

But somehow, they scrounged up the feeling of home together, one day at a time.

And it didn’t make sense, the ways they fit together.

It made all the sense in the world.

One morning on a day with no plans, no classes, Jaskier woke late and fumbled out of the bedroom to find Yennefer sitting cross-legged at the table, her hair slipping from a loose bun as she sipped at her tea with a book open on the table beside her. She didn’t look up as she told him there was fresh-brewed lavender tea in the kettle, and he saw over her shoulder that she was reading _poetry_ of all things, squinting at the words as though they were glyphs to be deciphered.

And he stood there for longer than he should have overcome with how it felt to see her sitting there, soft with sleep, frizzed around the edges, slender finger trailing along the words in the book, brow creased. He flopped beside her rather than do anything silly or dramatic like swoon to the floor with the overwhelming weight of it all, and she looked up at him, seeming to catch wind of his loss of balance anyway, lips half-parted and the wrinkle between her brows deepening.

“And that was when it happened,” said Jaskier.

“And that was when I kissed him,” said Yennefer.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i wrote this whole ass fic just so jaskier and yennefer would kiss and i can and will build up to it with as much melodrama as POSSIBLE


	14. Chapter 14

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The one where they kiss.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> smooch time

Dust motes spun in the light filtering through the windows of the cottage, no sound but the rush of the surf, the warble of songbirds in the garden, and the creak of wooden floorboards as Jaskier stole into the room to sit close beside her at the table.

She had woken before the sun rose, the blanket shoved down around her bare legs, her forehead pressed against Jaskier’s shoulder. The both of them slept naked now as the spring thaw slipped into summer, the nights warm and muggy.

To an outsider, their sleeping arrangements and even the whole of their little life here would appear strange and perplexing, that they slept bare beside one another and yet not in the way one would expect.

Frankly, Yennefer didn’t give a rat’s ass what an outsider had to say.

Jaskier slept as noisily as he went through life, snoring and wuffling, mouth tipped open and drooling with face half-smashed in the pillow, his arms and legs splayed wide across the mattress. It felt completely stupid to be charmed by him even like that, and yet.

Here she was. Charmed all the same.

She slipped from bed to pull on a gauzy dress that hung to her thighs and went out to the front room to coax the fire to life and warm the water in the kettle she had drawn up from the well the night before. Morning had begun to lighten in the windows, and she ran her fingers along the worn spines of books on the shelf along the far wall, thumbed out a new one Jaskier had brought from town.

It creaked open in her palm. All neat scrawl and endless verse. She could understand the allure of poetry, how even mundane words carried a certain sort of magic, but its power eluded her.

Teapot whistling and leaves set to steep, she settled in to flip through the yellowed pages. Catching on a familiar string of verses, she drew her finger along the name _Julian_ written in sweeping cursive above a number of poems. She read one under her breath and then another, turned a page to read the next and went still as she did so. 

_as sweet in spring the lilac swells in bud_  
_as clear the river flows into the sea_  
_as warm the heartbeat shivers in the blood_  
_so sweet and clear and warm she is to me_

_though shortly does the flower fade in spring_  
_though dark the waters sink into the deep_  
_though blood may spill on thorns that catch and sting_  
_so gentle does she yet appear in sleep_

_as fragile as an ochre buttercup_  
_as fleeting as a dandelion’s seed_  
_as deftly snuffed as weeds her fingers pluck_  
_so do I fear she will grow tired of me_

_though reaching root and vine may be wrenched free,_  
_I cannot help but tangle her with me_

As Jaskier dropped beside her on the cushions, she looked up to see his expression gone soft in streams of morning light. His fingertips pressed against the back of her hand where it rested on the open book, a whispering touch that was gone again in an instant.

“Morning,” he said and would have said more if she did not lean up to kiss his open mouth.

It was not, in the grand scheme of things, an earth-shattering kiss. Time did not stop. The Spheres did not tremble and sing. Fate crept on past them without a sound.

His lips were soft and warm, and the wisps of the facial hair he had been attempting to grow out into a goatee tickled her cheeks. Her hands pressed down into her folded legs to keep her balance and his lifted to brush her shoulder, the line of her jaw.

She drew away after a beat of held breath to find him looking at her, his mouth still half-parted. Tenderness ached in his gaze, touched with awe and a flicker of surprise and other things she could not name.

Gods above, the way he looked at her.

“Yen?” he asked as he licked his dry lips, voice small and pitched high, breaking. “What was that?”

“I’d have thought you would be familiar with what a kiss is. Or are your romantic endeavors as embellished as your tales of the Witcher?”

This close, she saw the faint blush that rose along his cheekbones as he struggled for words.

“No, I-- I mean. What?”

She had seen him flustered many times but rarely had it been so endearing. How ridiculous that she could find this strange man gaping like a fish as his cheeks burned red the slightest bit endearing. And yet.

“Do you need me to repeat myself?” she asked, and his eyes flicked down to her mouth.

“ _Yes_ ,” he breathed, and as she leaned into him again, his hands caught her more firmly around her shoulders, her own reaching to tangle in the loose fit of his tunic as their lips pressed together.

He breathed out through his nose, shaky. Her fingers loosened their grip on his shirt and lifted to cup his jaw, the kiss deep but still.

Jaskier drew away this time only to press their foreheads close together. His face blurred out of focus, but Yennefer could see that his eyes were closed, his mouth dropped open to draw deep, trembling breaths.

“Is it as sweet as you imagined?” she asked, and though she had meant it teasing, she found her own shaky voice betraying her. Her hands moved to rest flat against his chest, feeling the heartbeat stuttering there.

“Hmm?”

“My kiss.”

“Your-- oh. Oh. The song. Your sweet kiss,” he said with a huff of a laugh that she felt against her lips. He hesitated for a breath before ducking in for a quick peck and pulling far enough away that she could see him grinning like a fool, pink splotches high on his cheeks and his sleep-ruffled hair warmed by sunlight. “I’ll never live that one down, will I?”

“Not likely,” she said.

“It doesn’t do you justice,” he said. “I’ll have to write you a new one.”

“As if you haven’t already,” she said, gesturing at the book of poetry opened on the table. He scoffed.

“That old thing? Amateur. Appalling. Tired.”

“You can’t have written this so long ago,” she said.

“Yes,” he said. “But the imagining of it pales in the shadow of the real thing. I could--” He leapt up, patting along his body for a pen, eyes searching the room for the little scraps of paper he kept tucked here and there.

“Do _not_ even think about running off to write poetry right now, you idiot,” she said and tugged him back down beside her.

“Not running off,” he said with a pout. “I’d need frequent reminding while I wrote. To keep the memory fresh.”

“Not right now, little bird,” she said and kissed him again, a thing with more heat than the last, pressing deeper. She rose on her knees to fit herself into his arms, and he hummed into her mouth.

When again they separated, the flush on Jaskier’s cheeks had risen further, his breath quickened to panting, his eyes having lost their focus.

“I didn’t think,” he breathed, dropping his eyes to her mouth and seeming to lose his train of thought. He swooped to press another kiss to her full lower lip, one to the corner of her mouth, one to the round of her chin. “In a million years, I never would have thought--” A kiss to the rise of her nose. Beneath the line of her lashes. “I never expected--”

“Use your words, bard,” she said, and he laughed and pulled her snug to him in an embrace, chin tucking into the crook of her neck and arms tightening across her back.

Yennefer pressed her face into his shoulder and echoed his grip, attempting and failing to remember the last time anyone had embraced her in such a way. If ever. Certainly not with the care and intensity that Jaskier did, as though if he held her too tightly she would shatter, too gently and she would float away on a breeze.

“Afraid you’ve got me a bit lost for them at the moment,” he said, muffled in her hair.

“Is this how you make all those maidens swoon for you? Tender, chaste embraces?”

“Are you swooning?”

“I don’t swoon,” she said, though she couldn’t say for certain what would happen if she attempted to rise to her feet at the moment. Swooning indeed.

“I happen to find great worth in tender embraces,” he said.

“Mmhmm,” she hummed, because she couldn’t disagree. Not enveloped as she was in his arms. He ducked his head to press a kiss to the hollow of her throat, and she feared what sound would rise from her lips if she attempted to express in words what that fleeting touch did to her.

“I didn’t think you would want this,” he mumbled into her neck. So quiet she felt it against her skin more than heard it. “I didn’t dare to hope.”

“I’m as surprised as you are.”

She knew by the shift of his cheeks against her shoulder that a stupid smile likely stretched across his face.

“Ooooh, Yennefer of Vengerberg _loves me_ ,” he sang, and she clamped down on the urge to smack him.

She wasted no breath on denying it.

There would be time for words and time for poetry.

For now, she allowed him to read the truth of that sentiment in the tightening of her thin arms about his waist.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i didn't taint the sweetness of that sonnet with flower sex puns and that's probably the least in character jaskier has been in this entire fic i'm sorry. i did try my best but we can't have it all


	15. Chapter 15

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They go on to bed and stay there a while.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this chapter is **explicit** kiddos. which is both a warning and a promise

As the sun rose high on what promised to be a very pleasant early summer’s day, the two of them returned to bed together.

Jaskier led her by the hand, loathe to let go of her even for the few steps from the table through the curtain into their bedroom.

Yennefer dropped her dark shift from her shoulders, and it fell to puddle at her feet as she climbed onto the bed. Jaskier stepped to his bedside table to fish about for the skeepskin condoms he kept tucked away there, but she reached to still his hand.

“Not necessary,” she said and gestured at her stomach. Jaskier remembered the dark swirl of the amphora, the sheen of her sweat, the menace in her eyes. “And you won’t catch anything from me.”

“Hmm,” he hummed. “And you trust that you won’t from me?”

“Gods above, I shouldn’t,” she said with a roll of her eyes. “But no, I mean only that it’s different for mages.”

“What, no magical sex diseases?”

“Nor mundane,” she said. “Just another of the perks among the downsides.”

He thought of the amphora again. Her aching desire for motherhood. Remembered her desperate, terrifying intensity that had struck fear to his core.

“What did you think of me?” he asked. “When we first met?”

“Thought you were an imbecile.”

“And now?”

“A bigger imbecile,” she said. “Who could be fucking me instead of chattering.”

“Right,” he said and clambered up on the bed beside her, ducking to kiss her on the mouth. Just a fleeting thing for the sheer fact that he could. A hand skimmed along her collarbone and dipped to take a full breast in hand. “God, that’s nice,” he groaned into the kiss.

“You’re wearing too many clothes,” Yennefer said as she plucked at his tunic. He stripped it over his head in a tug that left his hair standing on end and shimmied out of his pants.

It no longer felt strange to be naked before her, having stripped bare many times to share their bed, but it was different now. His cock stood half-hard between his legs for one, and Yennefer’s gaze roved over him as he kneeled before her.

“Like what you see?” he said, trying at cocky. Some of his insecurity crept its way in anyway.

He was no Geralt.

He was not a taut pillar of bunched and flexing muscle, not a creature of exotic looks and cutting abs and pectorals rigid as marble. His body was lean in places and soft in others, slender and dusted with hair. Not scrawny or pudgy and not unattractive, but in comparison to Yennefer’s previous bed companion, he surely appeared ordinary.

Reading that hint of uncertainty in his tone, Yennefer smiled and kneeled to pull her to him in a heated kiss, opening her mouth as he did to flick their tongues together. The contact shot a pulse of fire straight to his groin.

A delicate hand brushed down the slim curve of his waist, along his hipbone, the hair of his trembling thigh, and he shuddered as her fingers curled around his erection and stroked up into her palm.

“Fuck,” he gasped, and she smiled into the kiss. “I am going to last, like, two fucking seconds here, Yen.”

“No, you won’t,” she said, and he closed his eyes to mutter a plea under his breath to whatever deity would hear him because he was well and truly _fucked_ and could use all the help he could get. “What are you doing?” she asked.

“Praying,” he said stupidly.

“Prayers of thanks?” Her hand tightened up the length of his cock, sweeping a thumb along the head to smear the beading liquid there. He didn’t quite manage to hold back a whimper.

“Prayers for _mercy_.”

“None here,” she said and pulled him by the hair into a kiss.

Their kissing in the dining room had been soft, tentative even, feeling one another out, pressing as much emotion as possible into each touch and gesture.

In their shared bedroom, their kissing became quick, seeking, brutal. Jaskier clutched tight to her bare shoulders as he breathed into her mouth, their teeth coming dangerously close to clacking as Yennefer surged up against him.

“Slow down,” he gasped into the kiss as she twisted her wrist and elicited a sharp pull of pleasure through his belly. “I’m really not going to--”

“You’re going to,” she insisted. “And you’re going to fuck me.”

He groaned.

“I promise I’m usually not like this,” he said. “I usually have a bit more finesse.”

He usually did a bit more than groan helplessly over something as simple as a bit of kissing and a hand on his prick. One could understand his poor performance though, given the circumstances.

“I’m sure,” she said.

“You’re impossible,” he said, and as she laughed at him, he took the opportunity to tumble her back onto the bed.

Intent on proving his usual prowess in bed, he kissed along her throat as his hands smoothed to spread her thighs, fingers finding the wet heat between her legs. He knew he had clever fingers, quick and sure from decades of strumming across lute strings and more direct forms of practice with his diverse run of bedpartners. He circled her, feeling her swell between his fingers, and was rewarded with a hitch of breath, a twitch of her thighs.

“Finesse,” he said with a wink, and she shuffled up on her elbows to glare at him.

“That’s not fucking me,” she said as he trailed kisses down her belly.

“Be patient,” he said as he twitched a finger down to crook inside her, his thumb teasing her clit.

“You’re the one who said you wouldn’t last.” Her words went shaky as Jaskier moved down to flick his tongue beside where his thumb circled.

“Did Geralt ever do this?” he asked with his mouth against her, the flat of his tongue sweeping over the flushed skin.

“Of course he did,” Yen huffed and then struck the flat of her palm against his shoulder with a blow that stung. “Don’t bring him up during sex.”

“Just curious,” he said, and the breath he blew from his lips against her sent a visible shiver through Yennefer’s body. “I know I pale in comparison in some departments, but in others I would hope I outshine him.”

“Stop comparing yourself to him,” she said. “He’s not in our bed.”

“Mmm,” he hummed against her. “Now that’s a thought.”

“Jaskier, would you please quit the prattling and the teasing and _be a little more useful_.”

“I’m being incredibly useful right now,” he said and leaned to suck her into his mouth, flicking his tongue, and she clenched her thighs against his shoulders, her heels digging into the flat of his back.

“As lovely as this is, that’s still not what I--”

“Did anyone ever tell you that you are terrible at accepting pleasure, my dear?” asked Jaskier, rising slick-chinned and loose to finally fit between her legs as she asked.

“I accept pleasure constantly and liberally,” she said. “I am excellent at accepting pleasure.”

“Sure, sure,” he said, hands on her spread thighs.

“I’m letting you fuck me, aren’t I?”

“See,” he said with a grin and pushed down the head of his cock to line up and press inside. He knew as he watched himself disappear within her that he truly didn’t have a scant chance of impressing her with his stamina. “Am I meant to thank you for the opportunity?”

“You’re meant to--” He shifted his hips forward, and she dropped her head back to draw in a quick breath, elbows threatening to give out where they propped her up. Jaskier leaned to suck at the exposed taut stretch of her neck. “You’re meant to be quiet and _move_.”

“You wouldn’t know what to do with me if I was quiet,” he said but obliged with rolling thrusts, drawing nearly his whole length out and back in with a slow press.

“Is this meant to be moving?”

“It’s called _love-making_ , Yennefer.”

“Love is it? Well, I personally would _love_ a good--”

“You’re very bossy,” he said as he grasped her thighs and tugged her down off her elbows to quicken his pace.

“Is this news?”

Sprawled beneath him, her dark hair spilled across the pillows, a flush creeping up the bare skin of her chest and a smirk tipped onto her lips, Jaskier thought how he had never known any woman so beautiful and so strangely right for him in ways he could not quite believe who he so very dearly wished to smother with said pillows.

Instead, he leaned to kiss the smirk off her lips, and as he had warned her, didn’t last beyond a few more stuttering thrusts.

* * *

The pair did not leave the bed that day, except to slip to retrieve a wedge of cheese and a dusty bottle of wine which they lounged naked to eat and drink, setting the wooden board and the wine glasses aside every few minutes to kiss again, the taste of tannins on their tongues and their lips stained bloody.

Jaskier had time to stretch his stamina, and Yennefer grew to accept that he would never do as he was told or cease his endless talk even with his face pressed between her legs.

But he knew she hadn’t expected such a thing, not really, or they wouldn’t have ended up entangled here as they continued to be.

As red evening light slipped in through the window opposite the bed, he held her back to front, propped against the wall as she rose and fell in his lap. They were loose with the wine and with the fucking, and by the gods, he loved her. He loved her in every ache of his tiring muscles and drag of chapped lips across her skin.

His hands trailed out along the breadth of her shoulders, and he leaned to kiss the knobs of her spine.

“I was not born so beautiful,” said Yennefer as her toned thighs flexed to lift her body from his lap and back down, the angle shifting him deep inside her.

“I have trouble imagining that,” he said, breath catching.

“I was a terribly sad little thing,” she said. “A twisted spine. Not a lick of poise. Shrunken into myself with fear.”

“Your shoulders are crooked,” he hummed as his fingers skirted across them. She leaned back into his chest so that he could not look, rolling her hips downward.

“That little thing died the night they changed me,” said Yennefer. “She’s gone the same as my womb. The same as my weakness.”

“I don’t think so,” said Jaskier. He dropped his hands to her waist and drove up with sharp thrusts. Yennefer dropped her head back against his shoulder, her dark hair falling down his back. He held his lips against the dip of her jawline, dragged them back to her ear. “I know you were as beautiful then as you are now. And as brave.”

“You can’t know that,” she said.

“I can actually. Because I know you.”

“As well I’ve let you.”

“You’ve let me know far more than you think.”

He cupped her breasts in his hands, the flesh rising and falling as he thrust up to meet her, his thumbs flicking her nipples to stiffness.

She turned her face into his neck.

“ _I love you_ ,” she whispered, and he lost his rhythm, gone still as he spent inside her. His hands trembled as they smoothed down her sweat-slick waist.

“I know,” he said and kissed her damp forehead. Held close inside her to feel their heartbeats slow together. “I’ve loved you my whole life.”

She snorted and swatted at him, eyes closed, head still tipped back on his shoulder.

“I loved you as you were,” he said against the crown of her head. “Crooked and all. I loved you when you hated me.”

“You didn’t,” she said. “You didn’t know me. And you hated me when I hated you.”

“I loved you,” he insisted. Another kiss to her dark hair and another for good measure. “I’ve loved you for hundreds of years or more. For thousands. I’ve loved you in every lifetime before this one.”

“You’re ridiculous,” said Yennefer.

“You love me anyway,” said Jaskier.

“I do,” she said. “I do love you.” It was music to hear. It was sweeter than any verse he had ever written or ever would.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *clenches fist* that's dynamic


	16. Chapter 16

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Geralt bonds with Jaskier & Yennefer. And he gets it. Probably.

So, Geralt learned the whole story down to each nitty gritty detail. Perhaps slightly embellished by both in different ways, but he could say, after a few months living in the cottage, that he had all the relevent facts.

The bard and the mage were not just shacking up, were not just passing the time here with a bit of fun, and it was unlikely anyone was ensorcelled.

No, at this point there was no other explanation for it.

Jaskier and Yennefer had fallen in love.

The feeling of it hummed through the walls of the little cottage, rippled through the floorboards.

It was a wonder that he hadn’t noticed it from the beginning, perhaps mistaking the subtle vibration in the air for a footprint of the magical wards that protected the place.

Which was likely not far from the truth. Their shared love entwining with Yennefer’s magic to cast a net of peace and security across the whole of the place.

Ciri thrived in it, and though the specter of Cintra still hovered, he had the suspicion that she had never known an environment like this even through her childhood. She had known love, surely, but to be raised as a princess did not leave much time for swanning about in the ocean surf and clapping along to folk songs in the garden and twirling barefoot across the sand.

On summer nights, they stacked huge driftwood bonfires that swung their shadows across the beach.

Jaskier sang something soaring and hopeful and Yennefer swayed with her eyes closed and Ciri laughed, bright and clear, and Geralt watched with a distinct and strange feeling settling within him.

Even around the warm circle of the fire with Jaskier’s elbow on his shoulder and Ciri pressing close to rest her head against him.

He was an outsider to it all.

* * *

Cooped up in the little cottage by the sea, Geralt grew more restless by the day.

Sure, there was nothing keeping him from going out and finding jobs, but creatures made themselves scarce this close to civilization, and he was loathe to leave Cirilla to venture farther afield.

Nilfgaard did not attempt a further press into the north, pushed well back and half-crippled after the disastrous Battle of Sodden, but their intelligence scouts sank their tendrils around every corner. Though Geralt knew the girl to be safe within Yennefer’s wards, they searched still for any word of the White Wolf who was said to be her guardian.

No man or beast could track him for long but to give the enemy any information at all was too great a risk.

So neither he nor the girl left the cottage, while to dissuade suspicion, the pair who lived there continued life as normally as possible.

The bard ambled off to Oxenfurt to teach at the Academy most mornings, and Yennefer disappeared in pursuit of her own business. Returning in the evenings to stir the little cottage to life with the smells of dinner cooking and with rousing conversation about their days.

He was not sure he would ever grow acclimated to it.

But he could not deny how it filled the place with warmth. How it made even the dull and dragging days seem full of life.

How it sent an ache of something like yearning deep into his bones.

* * *

“My wards,” said Yennefer, swirling the amber liquid in her glass. “They are very sophisticated.”

“Hmm,” Geralt hummed, fist curled around his own drink. Knowing well enough to not like where this was going.

The bard was playing at some late night function in the city, and Ciri had long gone up to bed. The freshly-opened bottle of spirits shared between them at the dining table had seemed like an excellent idea at first. Until Geralt remembered just how much still lay unspoken between them.

By then, it was too late.

Yennefer sprawled back on the cushions, wearing something dark and flowing that clasped about her neck with a silver choker, her dark hair loose down her shoulders.

“Yes, very sophisticated,” she repeated, peering down into her drink. “Do you know I am able to glimpse the intentions of any who step through my door? Just a glimpse. Anything more would be a terrible drain of resources. But a glimpse is often enough.”

Geralt swallowed a long pull of his drink.

“Why tell me this?” he grunted.

Yennefer’s grin said why. Because she truly thrived on the spectacle of his discomfort, apparently.

“You have to know I’ve felt you listening, Witcher,” she said.

“Listening to?”

He would not give her the satisfaction.

She took a swig instead of answering, wiped her mouth on the back of her hand.

“I’m no fool,” she said. “Though you seem to take me for one.”

“I don’t take you for a fool,” said Geralt, because he didn’t. The buzz of drunkenness in his head allowed for more candor than usual.

“You’ve listened to us fuck,” Yennefer drawled. He grimaced.

“Had to. Didn’t want the girl to barge in on something she’d regret.”

“The girl is nearly a woman,” said Yennefer. “She is no infant. She’s likely heard and seen worse at any royal function from the time she was old enough to sit still at the high table.”

“Fine,” he said. “I’ll be less courteous next time.”

“Mmmm,” she hummed. “Courteous. Is that what they’re calling it these days?”

“I doubt you’d know. The way you two go on.”

A dangerous spark lit in her gaze, and she leaned forward against the table.

“This is our home,” she said. Geralt tried not to wince at the emphasis on _our_. “We are the ones doing you the courtesy in allowing you to remain here.”

“Right.” Geralt nodded, swallowing another long pull from his glass. He felt far too sober for this conversation.

Gratefully, Yennefer leaned back again, her focus turned to her drink, the crackling static in the air dissipating.

“I long let go of any ill will I felt toward you, Geralt,” she said. Something almost soft slipped into her tone, and the drink put splotches of collar high on her cheeks. Truly, she was beautiful in ways Geralt could not fully express. “Fate has intertwined us in ways I did not expect. And no longer resent.”

“No?” His voice gone rougher even than usual.

“I cannot bear a child,” she said. “I cannot be free from you. But even so, I have a family.”

“Yen,” he grunted. Could say no more than that. Overwhelmed as he was by how simply she stated something so vast and complicated.

“You can thank him for that as well,” she said. “I would not be who I am now if he had not been by my side this past year. You owe a great many things to him.”

“I do,” he said, her honesty bevying his own.

“Then maybe, Witcher,” she said. “You should bother to tell him.”

* * *

“Do you still think me bewitched?” asked the bard, examining the contents of his goblet.

The situation bore a striking resemblance to his drunken chat with Yennefer. Geralt could put the blame for that squarely on the shoulders of said sorceress, who had dropped a new bottle of wine onto the dining table after dinner and quickly swept Ciri from the room to embark out to the garden.

 _Certain herbs bloom only by the light of the moon_ , she had said as an excuse before stealing her away.

Jaskier had wasted no time in beginning to guzzle wine. Would have done so straight from the bottle had Geralt not intervened with receptacles pulled down from the shelves. Said bottle had soon drained into a second.

“I don’t think you bewitched,” he said with a sigh. Resigned to whatever sort of conversation this was.

“Beguiled? Ensorcelled? Charmed?”

“No,” he grunted.

“How about possessed? Transfixed? Bamboozled? Enraptured?” he asked, hands gesturing widely. “I could do this all night.”

“I don’t think she’s trapped you in her thrall,” he said. “Not anymore.”

“Enthralled!” he exclaimed. “Now, Geralt, we could make a wordsmith out of you yet.”

“You two seem genuinely… enamored.”

“Lovely choice of diction, Geralt. _Enamored_. Didn’t know you had it in you.”

“I have lots of things in me,” he said. Thought about that phrasing a second. Frowned.

“That’s what--”

“Don’t you even--”

“--she said.”

Geralt frowned more deeply with as much disappointment directed at the bard as possible.

“I don’t know how she tolerates you.”

“Oh, not well,” he said with a bright grin. “Hardly a lick.”

“And yet, she keeps you around.”

“Oh, she sure does.” And Jaskier winked. In exaggerated and completely ridiculous fashion.

“Hmm.” Not drunk enough for this.

“You know how she is. Incredibly demanding.”

Absolutely nowhere near drunk enough.

“I’m not discussing this with you.”

“Wise man,” said Jaskier sagely. “Probably for the best.”

“I say again. No clue how she tolerates you.”

“Do you not know me at all? I’m incredibly charming.”

“If one’s consumed enough wine,” said Geralt, and Jaskier scoffed.

“You tolerated me just fine for however many years of my life I wasted running about the Continent after you,” he said. “Though perhaps that isn’t the best example. Seeing as you did stop tolerating me in pretty dramatic fashion. But bygones be bygones!”

“Yeah,” slurred Geralt. “Uhhh… sorry ‘bout that. Again.”

The bard seemed wholly unbothered by the subject matter, waving off his awkward apology. He gripped the bottle around the neck to pour a fresh glug into his goblet, wine sloshing as he swung his arms wide.

“Honestly Geralt,” he said. “I’m long over it. I’ve accepted things, you know? Accepted my place in the world.”

“And that is?” He cursed himself immediately for playing along.

“That’s easy,” said Jaskier, and he looked the perfect state of disheveled drunkenness. “My place is here. At her side.”

His hair lay messy across his forehead, his eyes bloodshot, his lips stained purple by the dark wine. Geralt’s eyes caught there a moment, watched his tongue flick out to wet his lower lip. Equally purpled.

 _Oh_. He was beautiful. In ways that Geralt had even less hope of expressing than he did Yennefer’s beauty.

“Mmmhmm,” he hummed, tipping his chin back to drain his goblet. The room spun.

“And at yours, of course,” Jaskier slurred. “You have to know if you asked I’d still follow you anywhere. If she obliged, of course. I’d think she would.”

“What,” said Geralt.

“It’s true,” he said. “Across the Continent and back. If you asked.”

“Why?” It was all he could manage. It made no goddamn sense.

Jaskier shrugged.

“I’m loyal,” he said. “And very stupid. Yen has expressed this to me many times.”

“Yen’s right.”

“That I’m endlessly loyal?” Jaskier teased. “Why thank you, Geralt.”

He had an opening to retort something about the bard’s endless stupidity but thought of what Yennefer had told him. What she had intended this conversation to be.

“You are,” he grunted. Grabbed at the wine to chug it straight from the bottle, throat working. “You’ve been more loyal to me than I deserve. Given me more than I deserve. I’m… grateful for it. For you.”

“Ah,” said Jaskier, suddenly gone a bit damp at the corners of his eyes. “Yennefer told you to say that to me, didn’t she?”

“No,” said Geralt, wholly unconvincingly. Jaskier waved his hands.

“It’s no matter,” he said. “Means a lot to hear it all the same.”

* * *

As a driftwood fire on the beach sank low, Ciri dozed with her head against his arm, and in the sleepy midnight lull, it took Geralt a moment to realize that Jaskier and Yennefer had slipped away from their place by the fire.

He blinked against the spots the flames left in his vision to pick them out in the darkness, enveloped in one another on the edge of the water. The moon rose over the horizon, casting a flickering pallor to the calm sea, and the froth of the ocean reached up the beach but drew away without touching their pale legs.

The pair were dancing, he realized, a slow thing with no complicated steps. Simply her following after him with one arm around each other’s waists, one clasped before them, her head against his chest. As Geralt watched, she leaned away, laughed, and reversed their steps. Her leading and him following.

He could not deny the proof he felt with his own senses.

She loved him. Strangely, achingly, wholly. All the same as he loved her.

And if their stories were to be fully believed, it likely wouldn’t have happened at all if Geralt had not pushed the both of them away.

How strange to sit by the dying fire on the little beach and realize he finally got it. Finally understood.

And what he understood also was that there could be no place for him within that love. That their devotion to one another left no space for him. Not in the ways it once had. That no matter what they expressed to him, it was obvious they had outgrown his presence in their lives. That they could go on with this small life here whether he stuck around or not.

He didn’t quite understand why that realization sank something dark and heated in his stomach, but so it did.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i wanted this to go ot3 quicker but geralt is just.... so stupid. i wrote him that way but still... still though. please get it together, son, this isn't that complicated.


	17. Chapter 17

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jaskier & Yennefer share an intimate moment.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this chapter marked E for Extensive Descriptive Butthole Prose. or in normal people terms, it's explicit. there's sex here. it's literally just sex.

The red glow of the sun setting over the sea slipped warm light into the room of the bedroom of the little cottage. The slow and languid pleasure of a late summer’s day had spilled into evening, though the pair in the bed hardly noticed. Lost in one another as they were.

Jaskier hummed in that mellow, drawn-out way that Yennefer so enjoyed against the flat plane of her stomach as they came down from a high together, ragged breath slowing.

“Your turn,” said Yen, endeavoring to push herself up from the boneless sprawl he had reduced her to, but he shook his head, stubble catching across her belly.

“Today’s about you,” he said.

It was, as far as she could estimate, roughly around the anniversary of her birth. In the past, she had set aside this day for a great bit of drinking and occasional orgy inspiration, but this year, Jaskier suggested something just for them.

That morning, the little bastard had actually scrounged up the willpower to wake before her and delivered a tray full of assorted breakfast foods to her in bed, a few sprigs of fresh-cut lavender framing the spread. What had followed the rest of the day had been pure self-indulgence on Yennefer’s part. Fresh fruit delivered to her lips and warmed oil massaged into her muscles until they were well and truly lax, and then, of course, the sex.

The sex with Jaskier was never a disappointment, never even so-so, but this somehow involved more intent focus and dogged pursual of her pleasure than usual.

If things continued like this, she risked settling back into sleep before the sun had fully sunk below the water. Which just wouldn’t do.

“Today’s about me,” she repeated, her fingers tangling in his dark hair as he rested his head against her belly. “So it’s your turn.”

Jaskier pressed a kiss against her sweat-damp skin.

“Not necessary,” he said, but she shushed him, pushed at his shoulders until he shifted off to allow her to slide out of bed.

She went to her vanity, slipped open a drawer, and drew out the purchase she had made not long ago in town, custom-ordered especially for her from a skilled artisan to the south.

“Oh,” he breathed, seeing what she held out to him. His hands, resting on the bed, curled into the sheets.

“Today’s about me,” she said again. “And I’d personally like to see how pretty you look while I fuck you.”

And she stepped into the harness, tightening the supple leather straps around her waist. The toy that jutted from her pelvis was curved and dark, shaped from blown glass. A demure little thing that did not seem so out of place pressed against her dark curls.

“ _Oh_.”

They had spoken about this a handful of times before.

Jaskier had lain with as many men as women in his time and plenty who skirted the boundaries and expectations of gender altogether, so he was no stranger to the act.

Yennefer, however, in all her predilection toward sexual dominance, had never been with anyone she trusted well enough to suggest it. Her tumbles with women had mostly been fleeting occurrences, and with men, it was less messy to dive on into the role they expected her to fit rather than risk exposing any teeming vulnerabilities.

She was demanding, yes, and took from her partners with haste and with insistence, but this was different.

This involved a certain threshold of trust. This involved giving something of herself, rather than simply taking.

The cold weight of the toy settling strange between her legs, she climbed back onto the bed with a vial of oil dangling from her fingers.

“Ok,” said Jaskier, pupils blown wide and lungs seeming to forget their function. “Ok um… how do you want me?”

“On your belly,” she said, and he rolled without hesitation.

He was not a small man, though he had always looked it dwarfed by the Witcher’s bulk, and the sight of him placidly baring himself to her, the bunched muscles along his broad shoulders held still and relaxed, sent a thrill of sharp arousal into her gut.

She pressed at the back of his knee until he shifted one bent leg up, fully revealing him beneath her gaze. Reached to run a cool hand down the lithe line of his back to the cleft of his ass. Pressed her thumb against the heated skin to spread him further.

Dark hair covered here as coarsely as it did the rest of his body, soft across the round of his cheeks and swept by the sweat of their previous activities into dark curls.

Jaskier made no protest to the scrutiny, his breath coming deep and gone ragged on stuttering exhales.

“Doing alright?” she asked and quirked her thumb as she did so, eliciting a sharply-drawn breath.

“Of course,” he breathed into the pillow, shifting so she could better hear him. “Why wouldn’t I be?” She rubbed gently with the flat of her thumb, and his grip tightened on the pillow. “Beautiful woman between my legs,” he gasped. “Ready and willing to fuck me silly. Gods above, why wouldn’t I be?”

Yennefer unstoppered the vial with her teeth, warmed its contents with a whispered word, and poured oil straight from it into the cleft of Jaskier’s ass, running wet and glistening over her hand and the place where her thumb touched. Somehow managed to maneuver the thing shut again and toss it aside without removing her focus from the sight before her.

Her thumb pressed still further, and she felt him willing the muscle receptive to her, the flat of her thumb dipping past the rim of his opening, a thing she knew took no small feat of relaxation and prior experience.

And trust.

Drawing her thumb away, she pressed a slender finger in its place and found it no difficulty to slip to the first knuckle. The palm that gripped his hip bone felt the slight tremble through his body, but he stayed open to her, the ring of muscles loosening to allow a second finger.

“You’re practiced at this,” she said. She did not say _”I’ve never done this before I’m not practiced I don’t want to hurt you.”_ Twitched a tentative curl of her fingers inside him.

“You implying something about my frivolous sexual nature?” he asked and, of all things, wriggled back against her fingers, sinking them deeper.

“I’m implying that I’m not the first one here, yes,” she said. He shifted to glance back at her, his face flushed pink.

“Is this so surprising? I get around,” he said, then leapt to clarify. “ _Used to_. Used to get around. But you, my dear, have stolen my heart, have laid claim to my very soul, have plundered my--”

“Quiet,” she said and pressed her fingers deep. He did not go quiet, of course, though she expected no less.

“Oh, unless you like the idea,” he said. One bright blue eye glinting back at her over his shoulder, his mouth parted in quick gasps as she filled and stretched him in rhythmic movements of her hand. Her palm coming to rest flat against the round of ass and drawing away again. “You like the thought of me being… practiced.”

“I won’t deny it,” she said, leaning across his back to press a kiss to his heated skin. “I like to watch. And to be watched.” The audience, the spectacle, the thrill of being seen and being allowed to see others did something to her that she could not quite explain. “Is this so surprising?”

“No,” he grunted. “I saw you through the window. In Rinde. You and him.” Heat struck low through her belly thinking about him there, peering through the cracked windows of the ruined house while she and the Witcher tangled in a rutting embrace on the floor.

She maneuvered a hand around his waist, wiggled into the space between his body and the mattress to feel him hard and throbbing against his stomach. No space there to wrap her hand around him so she pressed her palm flat to him instead, allowed him to rut down against her and into the mattress.

“Did you like what you saw?”

“It was--” Her fingers within him crooked and parted, and he groaned into the pillow. “It was very athletic. Quite a lot of enthusiasm.”

“That’s one way of putting it.”

As she leaned against him to kiss along his shoulderblades, she nearly forgot the thing strapped between her legs until it bumped against where his upper thigh met the curve of his ass, and Jaskier startled at the sudden prodding pressure.

“That’s good enough,” he gasped. “You can--”

“That’s hardly been enough preparation,” she said but stilled the movement of her hands. _Don’t want to hurt you._

“Practiced, remember?” he said and pressed back against her fingers to prove it. Which freed some space beneath him for her to take his hard length into her hand and stroke.

“I remember,” she said and pulled her fingers free from him, shuffling closer between his legs to guide the oil-slicked blown glass toy to where he was stretched and loose. Pressed easily past the first ring of muscle and pushed almost to the hilt.

The toy was not large, designed for this kind of encounter, but it still sent a quiver of lust through her to see herself buried within him, the swell of his cheeks and their fine curls of hair nearly resting against her taut belly.

“Admiring the view?” he asked, and she shifted her hips to press back and in again. He turned his face into the pillow to muffle a moan, and Yennefer stilled her hips a moment with an intake of breath, then moved to set a slow, insistent pace within him.

She found herself surprised at how good it felt, given the lack of flesh and blood appendage to connect her more directly to the motions of the toy inside him, but she felt each thrust like a pulse of heat up through her groin. The base of the toy pressed in just the right spot against her, and she felt no numbness or disconnect, as though some magic she had not cast allowed the warmed glass to spark with sensation.

 _Oh_ , she thought. She would have to do further research into such enchantments for next time.

“Gods, Yen,” he breathed. “You can-- you can go faster.”

“I can, can I?” she asked, pulling at his thigh with one slim hand until he shuffled up to his knees and allowed her a longer drag on each pull and press at an angle that made him hiss between his teeth. His erection twitched in her hand, and she shifted her thumb to smear fluid across the head, sinking with a twist down the base.

“You-- Can you?”

“Is that you asking?”

“Well, that’s not me asking you to stop,” he drawled. Which, of course, prompted her to halt pressed deep within him, watching the muscles in his shoulder jump as he clenched his fists into the pillows. “Yen!”

He looked… well, he looked as he always did, too pretty for his own good and solid in ways she was always surprised by and a little like something that would not look out of place depicted in repose on an arched ceiling or carefully-woven tapestry. She couldn’t quite put to words the feeling evoked by seeing his bunched arms twitch and his red mouth part, his lashes a dark line across his cheeks, his hair mussed and wild. Not fragile, not delicate, but no word quite described him except _beautiful_.

And he was allowing this vulnerability. Allowing her to see him and know him. Welcoming it.

The fondness that struck her then almost drove her to curl to clutch him in a tight embrace, convey some small parcel of that by just clinging to him as best she could, but instead, she began to move her hips again and sought a more demanding rhythm.

His voice rose high on a moan in appreciation.

She thought of him watching from the window in Rinde. Thought of him ducking through to join them.

“Did you ever think about this those long years following him?” she asked into the soft skin behind his ear. “Of the Witcher doing this to you.”

He shuddered beneath her.

“Of course,” he said. “ _Of course._ Thought we weren’t talking about him in-- _ah_ \-- in bed.”

“Changed my mind,” said Yennefer with a snap of her hips that had him crying out. “And today’s about me.”

“Right,” he gasped.

“I’d like him to watch,” she said, breath against the shell of his ear. She kept a steady rhythm inside him. “Watch me have you like this.”

“A taste of what he can’t have?”

“Mmmm,” she hummed. “I can share.”

“Fuck.”

His voice broke on the curse, and she tightened the circle of her fingers to allow him to thrust down into her hold with each press of the toy within him.

“I could watch you and him together. Watch him fuck you,” she said. “Or you fuck him.”

“ _Fuck_ , Yen, that’s--” He didn’t elaborate, at a rare loss for words.

She couldn’t say what drove this current fantasy, but it filled her to the brim with an ache she couldn’t quite name.

The ache twisted into her stomach, firing out along her groin in the form of an orgasm that built and built into a clawing drag of heat that warmed down her thighs and crescendoed.

The force of it pressed her forward inside of him with stuttering jerks of her hips as though truly finishing deep within his body, and she watched from some distant place above her as Jaskier’s eyes fluttered back into his head and he spent in warm pulses onto the sheets and the back of her hand.

His trembling thighs collapsed soon after, and Yennefer promptly knocked her chin against the round of his shoulder and there was a scrabble to right themselves that ended with a chorus of _ow ow ow ow_ from the both of them as they managed to separate and fall beside one another in bed.

Yennefer lay flat on her back to catch her breath. When she cracked her eyelids to look at him, his expression gleamed with mirth, still on his belly, one hand curled under his chin with a finger tapping against his jaw.

“Are we going to discuss the talk about Geralt during sex thing or allow it to slip blissfully into the annals of sweet, sweet memory?” he asked, and she slapped his shoulder.

“We share a history,” she said with a shrug. “Is it so strange that it would be of inspiration?”

“Others may think so, yes.”

“Others don’t have any say here.”

“Except Geralt?”

She shook her head.

“It’s not about that,” she said. “We may never encounter him again. I’m not sure I’d have much different to say to him if we did. But…” Her brows drew together, frowning up at the darkening ceiling. A last few dregs of evening remained, the light fading slowly from orange to blue. “But if I hadn’t met him. I would not have met you. We would not be here.”

“We might have met anyway,” said Jaskier, kissing her bare arm and then the swell of her shoulder, her collarbone. “Crossed paths in some tavern somewhere. Our eyes may have met from opposite sides of a crowded market.”

“I would never have looked twice at you,” said Yennefer and then winced at how that sounded.

“I would have not been able to look away,” said Jaskier, showing no offense.

“Maybe,” she said, relenting. “Maybe we would have loved one another anyway.”

“I know we would have,” he said. He kissed the line of her jaw, the corner of her mouth. Drew back to meet her gaze, eyes hooded with a tenderness that made some place behind her ribs hurt. She pressed her sweat-damp forehead to his. “With or without him. All of me would have loved you.”

“Maybe,” she repeated and, unexamined for now in the exhausted fade into darkness at the end of a long and exquisite day, some small worry began to grow.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the masses requested butthole prose. the masses have been delivered butthole prose. (no one requested it and no one wanted me to write butthole prose that many times either)


	18. Chapter 18

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ciri is no stranger to unconventional relationships

Ciri, given who had raised her, was no stranger to unconventional relationships.

After spending a cold and isolated winter in the keep in the mountains, none of the Witchers quite sure how to engage with her, the atmosphere in the little cottage by the sea was a welcome and startling relief. She saw and felt it at once, the ways that the pair who lived there fit neatly together.

It was baffling to hear Geralt balk at it so consistently.

She recognized the fond tone in their bickering, knew the exasperated huffs and flung insults to be mostly bluster, noticed the subtle glances and gestures that spoke of trust and commitment and shared history.

She had seen the same in her guardians throughout her childhood.

The ways that Eist would moan and drawl and roll his eyes and that Calanthe would snap and belittle and bark orders. Their disagreements were legendary, often at a volume that seemed to rattle the very stone of the keep, but they always ended in tender murmuring, the pair of them bent as close as public decorum would allow, his eyes hooded and her lips twitching at the edges.

It stung bitter and aching to know they existed only in her memory now.

Never again would she overhear them bent to whisper to one another. The way her grandmother would shape the phrase _my love_ on her lips without speaking it aloud. The fleeting brush of Eist’s fingers to tuck her hair behind her ears.

But.

She saw them in the bard’s intentional needling and in the gleam in the mage’s eyes that belied her amusement even as she snapped at him. She heard them in Jaskier’s exaggerated crooning of _my heart, my moon and stars, my tender blossom_ that earned him a cuff about the head and in the fond _little bird_ Yennefer sometimes tacked on the end of a scathing reproach.

“Doesn’t make any sense,” muttered Geralt, while watching from a distance as the two of them walked along the lip of the coast together.

“Why not?” asked Ciri. She was busy attempting to learn how to start and maintain a decent fire, the flint fumbling from her grasp.

“Just doesn’t,” he grunted. “Don’t pick that back up. Will have to learn to start one without a flint as well.” Ciri grumbled. She didn’t know why this was necessary, given that the Witcher could start a fire with a word and a convenient hand sign. “Won’t always be here.”

Which he seemed to notice immediately was the wrong thing to say, as something of the sudden spike of sorrow that struck through her must have shown on her face.

Though under his care only a few short months, Ciri had grown fond of her Guardian of Surprise, no matter how stoic and useless for conversation and frankly oblivious he was.

So many of those she loved existed only in her memory now. She worried that the details would prove more difficult in time to draw up, sinking deeper and deeper into the well of her mind. She did not know how much heartbreak she could carry without some pieces slipping away from her.

Could she keep this place alive in her memory if forced to?

The humble cottage by the sea. The grey line of the horizon and warm round of the sand and shrieking cry of the gulls. Geralt hunched beside her in the grass, his brow furrowed. Yennefer standing with an arm around Jaskier’s waist with the water swirling around their bare legs. The ease with which she turned her face into his neck to mouth something. The delighted smile he pressed into her hair.

* * *

She remembered the bard well from visits to Cintra throughout her childhood.

His stays had been brief but memorable, as his lilting voice far outstripped the talent of any of their regular court minstrels. His performances were always engaging and lively and allowed sitting demurely at the high table through the night to feel less like an absolute bore.

At least once per performance, he swept across the length of the hall, lute strummed expertly, and stopped with a jaunty skip to play some new thing expressly for her.

“For the most lovely and fierce lion cub of Cintra,” he proclaimed with a sweeping gesture and began to strum some maudlin ballad that Calanthe scoffed at but little Ciri adored. She had always liked the ones that ended sad and haunting, thrilled at the strange hitch they inspired in her chest.

Now that that hitch felt permanent and more real than ever, she understood maybe why her grandmother had not loved the maudlin ones.

“Would you write a song about something specific… if someone asked?” Ciri said to him as they stood together in the kitchen. She had been tasked with peeling potatoes for dinner and did so with clumsy strokes with the skins tumbling into a bucket at her feet.

“Hmm, quite honestly, inspiration is fickle and cannot be coerced.”

“Oh,” she said. Flicked another sliver of potato skin into the bucket. He smiled at her, a soft thing that warmed in her chest.

“What do you have in mind, little Cirilla?”

“My grandmother,” she said. “No one remembers her the way I do.”

“Ah,” he said. Rested a hand on the side of her head that she could not help but lean into. “So very sorry for your loss.”

“I’d like something happy,” she said. “That you could dance to.”

A few weeks on, having forgotten the request, she was perplexed during a chill night gathered around a bonfire on the beach when the bard stilled his playing to step before her and bow low. He leapt from the bow into a rousing, flirtatious ditty about the Lion of Cintra and her dear husband, and as requested, the song was marvelous to dance to, her skirts twirling and fluttering in the night air.

* * *

“Geralt says you were there the night I was promised to him,” said Ciri to Jaskier on a day darkened by rain. “He’s no good with details. Tell me the story.”

And he did, with as much zest and gusto as possible, sitting cross-legged to do so in the dimly-lit front room. Geralt grunted or huffed occasionally from the other room like some kind of recalcitrant beast, and Yennefer bumped her shoulder against him when he built to exaggerated heights that Ciri knew not to believe a word of.

By his telling, the Witcher single-handedly fought off an army of deadly assassins attempting to end her dear, curse-afflicted father’s life. The marriage vows, when the tale climaxed with a touching double wedding ceremony, were florid and over-embellished with words her grandmother would never have dared utter, especially not in full earshot of the court.

Ciri laughed at the thought of her saying anything so completely nonsense as _”oh Eist, the sunlight of my days that bleeds warmth into my very bosom, oh, oh, I take thee to be wed”_.

And that was the intention of his hyperbole, Ciri was sure.

He lived to entertain, and she was glad for it. She knew the truth to be too messy and too painful anyway.

Later, he did tell her something more honest, a warm hand on her shoulder.

“Geralt is a good man,” he said, uncharacteristically sober. “Do not ever doubt that he has your best intentions at heart.”

“He didn’t ask after me. When I was young,” she said. “I didn’t know his name until--” She could still smell the acrid smoke of her home in flames.

“It wasn’t for lack of caring,” Jaskier said. “He thinks terribly lowly of himself, our Geralt. And of his life. I’m sure he didn’t want to drag some poor child from a loving home and strap them to that life. He himself was a surprise child. At least, that’s how they say the Witchers did things all those years. He’s never shared the details, that stingy bastard.”

Something weird and tender showed in his expression. She recognized it easily.

Ciri knew unconventional relationships.

“You love him?” she asked. “The way you love Yennefer.”

“Oh, of course,” he said with a smile that tried at whimsical but mostly ended up looking sad. “Though love is not so simple sometimes, little Cirilla.”

“Yes, it is,” she protested. “And I’m not little anymore.”

He clucked his tongue and leaned to press a fond kiss to the crown of her head.

* * *

At first, it was clear that Yennefer did not know quite how to interact with her.

Geralt had sought her in hopes of helping her explore and learn to control her innate power, driven by the fear that it may overwhelm her if allowed free reign, and so, Yennefer became her mentor of sorts, beginning to teach her the basics of magic.

Problem being that since entering Geralt’s care, Ciri had felt not a lick of that primal force within her, and she was woefully terrible at any of the exercises given to her. She could not will a stone to budge even with all of her concentration poured into the traitorous thing. She could not draw water from a flask to hang as a swirling orb in the air as Yennefer demonstrated. She could not even effectively use the signs that Geralt showed her, pressing her fingers down into the correct gestures.

“I was the same,” said Yennefer as they knelt in the garden together. “Don’t fret. Some things come with time.”

Yennefer taught sometimes like she was reading from a script, repeating something that had no doubt been spoken to her in training. She seemed to realize this only after the words left her. Jaskier watched on with mirth over her puzzled frown.

“How did you meet him?” Ciri asked. “Geralt, I mean.”

“That’s complicated,” said Yennefer, and nearby, Jaskier snorted.

“But you’ve had sex.”

Jaskier promptly choked on his tea and had to endure several long minutes of back-pounding from Yennefer before he could wheeze out, “ _please_ , give me warning before you say those things.”

“What kind of warning could I possibly give?” Ciri asked.

“Whew, don’t know! A hand signal?”

Ciri made a rude gesture with her forefinger and the curled circle of her other hand, and Jaskier looked like he might pass out, pressing a hand to his chest.

“To answer your question, yes,” said Yennefer. “Quite often. With vigor.”

“Too much detail! Too much!” Jaskier squawked at her, and she shushed him.

“So you love him?” asked Ciri, which earned her a high note of laughter from Yennefer and a shrug from Jaskier.

“Again,” she said. “It’s complicated.”

But the ways she stared at the Witcher when he could not see her looking did not seem so complicated. It was a look Jaskier shared in his covert watching.

“Also,” said Yennefer. “as far as I see it you’re old enough to say whatever you wish. Our society certainly deems you old enough to bear the brunt of man’s burdens. You can speak your mind here. Curse as you wish."

Ciri thought on this a moment.

“Fucking excellent,” she said.

Jaskier, having tipped his cup back up to his lips, sneezed tea halfway across the room.

* * *

The expression that soured Geralt’s face at times as he kept a close eye on the pair could not really be attributed to simple confusion.

It did not take her long to realize the truth of it.

Geralt was jealous.

 _Which one are you jealous of?_ she wondered aloud in the garden. _Or both, maybe?_

His former travel companion and his old flame. Both caring deeply for him, and he caring for them in return.

Some old hurt ached there that Ciri wasn’t privy to, but that shouldn’t matter.

She wasn’t sure why it all had to be so fraught with tension. Why they didn’t simply work things out and fall together, as Fate seemed to urge them to. To her, it was uncomplicated. It simply made sense.

She was no stranger to unconventional relationships, after all.

* * *

Languid summer days fled into fall.

The nights took on a chill, and the bonfires rose higher, eventually given up for fires blazing in the hearth.

Then, one morning, something inspired Ciri to wake well before dawn, a strange feeling prickling along her skin. She snuck from her bedroom in the loft and stole out to the stables.

There, she found Geralt strapping his twin swords to Roach’s saddle.

“What are you doing?” she asked, and he sighed, shoulders slumping. Turned to look at her with a stoic expression set firmly on his face.

“Stay here with them,” he said, clapping a big hand on her shoulder. “Kaer Morhen is no place for a child. And it’s dangerous on the road.”

“You stay here then,” she said, gripping at his hand. “Why do you have to go?”

“You have no need of me,” said the Witcher. “Not really.” There was an unspoken _none of you do_.

“But you said--” _People linked by Destiny will always find each other._

“I found you,” he said. “And I brought you here. Maybe that’s the end of that.”

Ciri’s breath caught. She didn’t think that was true but knew she could not convince him otherwise. She knew this about him now, that he was stubborn and ridiculous and so, so stupid for one so clever.

“Will you come back?” she asked.

The Witcher grimaced.

“Be good, little one,” he said. Grabbed Roach’s reins. Turned to leave the stables.

“You won’t wait to say goodbye?”

He stopped in the doorway, his face turned away from her.

“Tell them I wish them well,” he said.

“Tell them yourself,” she said, but the Witcher swung into the saddle, urged the red mare to a swift trot and was away into the chill morning.

Prickling intensifying along the line of her scalp, Ciri stood in the fresh quiet of the barn with the slumbering horses to watch through the open doorway as the figure faded into the hills.

When she stole back into the house, she found Yennefer sitting at the head of the dining table, her hands folded together in her lap. The fire had not yet been stoked to life, and the cottage sat still and cold.

“He’s off then?” she asked, and Ciri nodded, hesitating on the threshold.

Yennefer lifted an arm, beckoning, and she hurried to fit against her side, tugged into an embrace. Ciri didn’t cry with her face pressed against her warm breast, but it was a close thing.

The winter promised to be long and cold.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ciri can have a little fuck word because i think it is very very funny and for no other reason


	19. Chapter 19

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jaskier & Yennefer entangle more deeply together

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> there's a blink and you'll miss it explicit moment in this here chapter also deeply sorry for what i am about to do

One morning, sometime after the beginning and a fair distance from the end, Yennefer woke in the grey quiet before dawn, fitted close against Jaskier’s naked back, and finally put a name to the bizarre and unfamiliar feeling that spread through her breast.

_Contentment._

When she turned to look at it, her all-consuming desire still raged like an inferno inside her, but she found it easier to look away in these moments. Allow that agony to be muffled to an itch. This life together in the little cottage by the sea could not fix her, could not knit her flayed edges back together, but perhaps, it could soothe over her like a gentle rain. It could spill into the cracks and flush them until the black ooze from her wounds ran clear.

It could not cure her, could not right the ways the world had wronged her, but it mellowed the terrible, clawing ache inside her all the same.

She curled an arm tighter around him, pressed her cheek against the chilled skin of his back, and clung to the feeling of settling warmth as tightly as she could.

For she knew, as all such things had unfolded in her long life, that this taste of sunlight could not last.

* * *

He led her down to the water on the cusp of a sweltering evening, pressing kisses to the back of her neck, murmuring about how good a swim would feel after a long day cooped up in the stuffy halls of the Academy, sweating in his stiff doublet.

Yennefer let her dress fall to the sand and stepped with him into the waves.

Later that night, she would regret it for the salt grit in her hair and the taut dryness of her skin, but she would not regret the slick way they moved together beneath the water, buoyed by the warming surf, touched by the reddened slant of evening light.

* * *

“Have you ever read my thoughts?” Jaskier asked as he tangled his fingers through her dark hair.

“No need,” mumbled Yennefer into the warm skin of his chest. “You blurt out whatever comes to mind before I get the chance to.”

* * *

The garden frothed up with blooms and fresh, green leaves. Perhaps more readily than a mundane garden would, helped along by Yennefer’s whispered incantations, but Jaskier had never paid much mind to plants before this, except to craft elaborate botanical metaphors.

He did so judiciously now in the shade of the crooked fruit tree in the garden, his pen sweeping across the page as he watched Yennefer pluck and prune and dig with a trowel.

“As sweet as a fresh-bloomed rose,” he crooned, and she quirked a brow at him.

“I’ll show you sweet,” she deadpanned. “And this is a hollyhock. Don’t you know any other flowers?”

“None so beautiful as you, my blossom, my petal, my rosebud.”

“Please, dear, remember who is currently holding pruning shears.”

* * *

Whispers flitted through the crowded halls of the Academy long before he caught sight of her.

The day was absurdly pleasant, blue skies and a fragrant breeze, so he had chosen to give instruction in the open courtyard for a change, his class of young artists much obliged to the decision.

She was a vision in dark lace, her gown floor-length and rippling black with a touch of iridescence like a blackbird’s breast, shifting to intricately-woven lace across her collarbones and down her long arms. In one hand, gripped loosely, she held the bagged lunch he had packed this morning and forgotten sitting on the dining table.

She strode toward him, the gaggle of ogling students parting around her, and pressed the lunch against his chest. Distracted as he was by how very beautiful and stunning and mesmerizing she was, he nearly forgot to grasp at it.

“Thank you, dear,” he breathed, and she patted his cheek and leaned up to press a kiss there, snickering students looking on and all, and was away again in a blink, leaving him bleary and dazed in her wake.

* * *

The horses picked carefully along a rock-strewn trail that led down the coastline, Little Sir bumbling behind Sparrow, the pace lazy and relaxed. They had no destination in mind, simply fancying a midday ride, the sun glinting off the water.

“This is much nicer without all the bandits,” said Jaskier, urging Little Sir on.

“That was only the once,” said Yennefer.

“And I suppose the end results of that encounter weren’t so bad.”

“Those being?”

Jaskier drew alongside her and leaned in the saddle to meet her in a kiss.

“Helped me realize I wanted nothing more than to do that. To spend my days beside you like this.”

Just then, Little Sir sidestepped around a boulder and Jaskier promptly overbalanced and barely avoided tumbling to the dirt.

“Maybe we can try a bit harder not to have a repeat of last time, little bird,” said Yennefer, laughing, and Jaskier clung to Little Sir’s neck with sheepish glee.

* * *

Together, they climbed the ornate stairs that led to the ballroom, Jaskier in pearlescent silks, Yennefer in a black gown edged in gold. His grace and beauty was offset by the ridiculous downy feather that jutted from the pastel pleats of his hat. Her mysterious, imposing aura was betrayed by the crooked smile she could not keep from her lips when looking his way.

In the rising hum of the crowded party, she quieted his too-loud criticism of the performing minstrels by tugging him to the floor into a whirling dance.

Perfectly in step, they spun ever closer. Forgot the rest of the room for the shared thrum of their heartbeats in their intertwined hands.

* * *

She rose on a broad swell of pleasure, his tongue laving up along the wet heat between her legs. His hair had gone longer, and she swept her fingers into it and tugged him closer. His hands gripped on her thighs, the warmth of his mouth pulling close to _suck_ , and she sang with it, the rush of blistering heat, the rising ache in her belly, the crash of the waves over her head as she quivered and groaned with it, choking, shattering.

She loved him like the cycle of the tides. Returning, returning, collapsing on his shores.

* * *

“Oh, my dear,” Jaskier cooed into her shoulder, wrapped around her from behind as she stoked the fire, a pot of stew bubbling above the hearth. “Oh, my love, how wonderful this is, how terribly much I love you. How my tender heart quivers in my breast. _Oh_.”

“Mmhmm,” she hummed, tempted to roll her eyes at this fit of melodrama, but she entangled their fingers where his hand rested about her waist. When he got like this, it was often simpler to wait him out until he had had his fill of it or rushed off to lock himself away and scribble verses.

“To think,” he said. “That for all our strife with him, we owe our Witcher such a debt. I fear I would have never known this sweet embrace if not for what was said on that mountain.” He sighed into her hair. “Oh, surely it was meant to happen, all that _heartbreak_ , if only to lead me to you. Surely I was meant to love you, even from my very first breath, even to my last.”

The fleeting worry that had settled up under her ribs through the summer stirred and stretched its wings.

As she looked into the bright flames in the hearth, a terrible thought struck her and solidified. Her grip tightened on his hand pressed against her stomach.

The worry fluttered cold in her chest, its wingspan spreading to blot out the sun.

And took flight.

“You mean like _Fate_ ,” she spat, with a venom that startled them both.

* * *

Like a fog, like the hushed tread of some nocturnal animal, like the cloying fragrance of a creeping bindweed.

Destiny had enveloped her here even so.

* * *

“I can’t be rid of him. I’m bound here all the same,” she said, a spark catching in her violet eyes, twisting in his arms. “Fuck. You’re the _Witcher’s_ bard. How could I be so stupid?”

Jaskier went still, his mouth parted. He allowed her to unlace their fingers and tug free of him, stepping away from the fire.

“You’re not bound to me,” he said.

“But I _am_ ,” she insisted. “How can you be sure I’m not?”

“I--” He frowned. He couldn’t be. “Yennefer, please. Come finish dinner. Come let’s eat and talk about this. Please don’t--”

She straightened up before him, standing square to face him, and Jaskier itched to comfort her, tug her close.

For all the blaze in her eyes and the upright stiffness of her posture, she looked small. Pained. She looked as though she wished to hunch into herself, fold down against the agony as she did in sleep. He could see the strife there, ached to soothe it, and feared it was beyond him.

“I can’t trust it,” she said. “Any of it.”

“I didn’t make a wish,” he said. “But I’d release you if I could. I would.”

“That’s not _enough_.”

Jaskier gave in to the impulse to comfort and reached to curl his fingers around her arm, but she jerked out of his hold.

“Yen,” he said.

“How do I truly know this isn’t _Destiny’s_ way of entangling me with him again?” she asked. “I can’t know. I can’t trust it.”

“Seems like there’d be more direct ways of going about that,” said Jaskier, some desperate last attempt to lighten the tension, but Yen didn’t laugh, her mouth twisting.

“I can’t stay here,” she said.

And she readied to leave.

He stood by, restlessly shuffling on his feet, as she began to throw together a pack, pulling down bottles, shoving in clothing. Far more seemed to fit in the little bag than she placed in.

“Where will you go?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Anywhere. Everywhere.”

He stopped her by the door with a soft touch to her elbow. Didn’t hold her there.

“Yen,” he said. “Can I stay in the cottage? While you’re gone.” What he meant was _I’ll wait for you to get back_.

“Of course,” she said. “Julian, listen, I--”

He waited, holding his breath, but she said no more.

She hesitated in the doorway, his fingers still pressed against her arm but not clinging, and leaned up to kiss him, a trembling, fleeting thing on the mouth.

And was gone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> yennefer gets a little stupid juice in these trying times


	20. Chapter 20

She rode hard, the black mare urged to a steady canter along the road. No concrete destination besides _away_.

She had forgotten to pack the enchanted tent or even a bedroll but felt no great desire to rest. She rode on through the night and into morning, finally stopping at a rundown inn on the outskirts of a nothing town only for Sparrow’s sake.

On the third day, feeling no less harried and flayed open and destroyed than the moment she turned her back on the cottage and the man she loved and rode out into the dusk, she let out a wail of frustration.

Slipped from the mare’s back and stumbled from the road. Pulled the rippling membrane of a portal around her.

And stepped onto the mountainside.

It looked just the same as that day that felt so long ago, the bare slope giving way to the treeline below. The sky beginning to blush with a slow-building sunset.

She settled on the rise of a boulder. Remembered catching sight of the bard as he returned to the empty camp.

As she rose to follow him down the mountain, she had been content in the belief that she had turned Fate aside, thwarted the chains that bound her, and firmly clutched at her own agency. So long had choice merely been an illusion.

It yet remained so.

How could she trust it? That choice she had made. The choice in following him, in loving him, in nesting on the coast to build a home around him.

She could trust it no more than the ache she felt for the Witcher.

She could trust it no more than any other illusion in her life. Simply smoke. Simply a vision waving in heat along the road. Something that no matter its reassuring sturdiness she knew would crumble to dust if she clutched it too tightly.

Better to flee while she still could.

As the sun dipped below the crest of the mountains, she tugged another portal over herself and returned to the road.

A destination materialized as she swung back into Sparrow’s saddle, the mare having not wandered far in the time she was gone.

 _Nazair_ , she thought, recalling the last letter she had received from dear Istredd, how she had thought his careful detailing of his excavation there endearingly dry and utterly boring.

Perhaps she needed boring.

 _This is my choice_ , she thought as she rode hard for the south.

“This is my choice,” she said aloud, the words stolen by the wind. As though speaking to Fate Herself, daring Her to attempt to block her path again.

She resisted the panicked flutter in her stomach that told her she was fleeing in the wrong direction.

She could not trust it.

She refused to be chained.


	21. Chapter 21

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jaskier copes without Yennefer. Cintra burns.

To the south, the horizon burned.

Wisps of soot darkened the days with charcoal streaked across blue skies. An orange glow warmed the night.

Whispers on the streets of Novigrad spoke of the destruction. Soon, they said, refugees would trickle in to tell the grisly tale, but this place would not be refuge long. Soon, Temeria to fall in flames. Redania, Kaedwen, the lot. The whole of the North, even this great city. Perhaps especially this great city.

But business continued of course, commerce stilted but ever-present, merchants nervous but holding ground, nobles keeping their bags packed and their entourage close but not yet fleeing. Even the purveyors of the arts galloped on at the same speed as though Nilfgaard did not march north. There were plays to produce and soaring notes to be sung and poems to be recited, even as the threat loomed, the conflagration that could swallow them.

Perhaps especially as the fires threatened to engulf them, he thought, the arts were necessary.

In the month since Yennefer’s disappearance, he had kept to his routine, kept himself busy. He taught lectures, he performed at banquets, he sought out errands and duties that kept him late into the evening so riding back to the cottage that lay still and dark felt less like a reopened wound every time.

He could pretend she too was simply out late, held up at some appointment or another. That if he went on to bed he would wake some time in the night to her tugging off her heels and letting her dress fall to the floor. That she would slip under the covers and press herself against him.

He missed her terribly.

He missed her in ways he could not quite confront without having to sit down a while, and he was not a man prone to sitting down for any longer than he had to, not even to compose poetry.

He was certainly not in any sort of mood to be composing poetry.

How strange that Geralt’s departure from his life after decades beside him had immediately inspired plenty of scathing and heartbroken and bittersweet verses but losing Yennefer after a few short months left him feeling hollowed out and bereft, as though she had taken every word worth writing along with her.

Riding back at dusk from the city, Jaskier slipped from Little Sir’s back on the dark rise of the hill. He hunched beside the horse against the chill wind to look out at the faint blur of light that was Cintra still aflame. The little cottage on the hill felt smaller than ever.

* * *

That night, Yennefer came to him.

He awoke in the still dark of their bedroom to the tight feeling of static discharge. The hair prickled along the back of his neck as he fumbled for the dagger he kept hidden nearby, but he was too slow, the darkness too full, and a hand stole around his wrist.

Her perfume. _Lilac._

“Yen?”

She breathed the bedside candle to life with a word as she sat on the edge of the bed, his wrist still trapped in her fingers. In the flickering light, her face was caught half in shadow. Her eyes blazed.

“Jaskier,” she said.

“What--”

“I can’t stay long.” And leaned to press their foreheads together. She had been drinking, the faint smell of ale on her breath. “I’ll be missed if I linger.”

“What are you doing here?” he asked.

“Nilfgaard sweeps North,” she said, which was not an answer. “I aim to hold them back.”

“Alone?”

An amused smile quirked onto her lips.

“A small company of mages protects Sodden Hill,” she said. “With luck, we should hold out long enough for…” Her voice trailed off. She didn’t have to say more. Long enough for someone to come relieve them or for them to perish there one by one.

“Yennefer,” he breathed. He lifted his hands to cradle the sides of her head, and she echoed the gesture, fingers splayed across his jaw. “What happened to staying as far out of their business as possible?”

“Guess I can’t ever really be rid of them,” she said. “They aim to drain me until the last drop. Take until there’s nothing left.”

She dragged in an unsteady breath, let it out. So close, he could not see her expression but could feel the slight shaking in the hands that held his face.

“Why are you here?” he asked.

“If I am destined to die tomorrow,” she said. “I should not want our parting words to be the last you remember of me.”

“You’re not destined to-- Don’t say that, Yen.”

“I can feel it,” Yennefer said. “Like an ache in my bones. Deeper still than that. Destinies converge tomorrow. Something changes.”

“Then stay,” Jaskier said, his voice trembling. “Fate can get fucked. Don’t go to Sodden.”

Shifting, she pulled a length of chain from her pocket. Reached to clasp it around his neck. He dropped a hand to grasp the amulet that hung from it, a shimmer running along the jeweled surface before fading to black in his palm.

“What is it?”

“So that I am with you,” she said. “Even a world away.”

Her fingers again tangled in the hair at the base of his neck, and Jaskier closed his eyes, turned his face to press his lips against the line of her wrist.

“Don’t want you to go,” he said.

“I’m sorry. For the way we parted,” Yennefer whispered. “I still can’t-- I can’t trust it. But I--”

“You missed me,” said Jaskier with a crooked smile. She tipped forward to kiss him, one long aching swell of a kiss.

“I trust you, you little bastard,” she said, and his thumbs stroked along the smooth rise of her cheekbones.

“Love you too, Yen,” he breathed.

Long after she had disappeared in a distorted ripple of air, Jaskier sat up in bed, his fingers curled around the amulet that rested against his bare sternum.

In the center of his palm, her heartbeat thrummed, strong and unfaltering.

* * *

Fire.

The great, lurching swell of a consuming inferno.

The roar of the blaze rolling out like a tide, and then.

Silence.

Curled in the crook of his fingers, the amulet _burned_.


	22. Chapter 22

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jaskier rides desperately toward Sodden. Toward Yennefer.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> chapter count is changing again because i don't want this story to be over and i love them so much (and i have a lot of time to write now as we all do haha i'm dying)

Her amulet thrumming against his chest, Jaskier rode hard along the dark road toward Sodden.

He seemed to blink right from bed on the edge of restless sleep to leaning forward in the saddle, heels thumping at the stallion’s sides, with only a blurry recollection of having left the cottage, tacked the horse, and ridden out into the dark. He had not thought to pack anything in his haste, wore only the simple, threadbare clothing he had worn in bed, no coin purse or a weapon. He cursed himself, feeling the chill of the night air against his bare arms. Riding toward a war without even a dagger.

The amulet pulsed as it rose and fell against his sternum. A frantic flutter that sent his own heart racing. And he urged the horse faster still.

For once, Little Sir did not balk when asked to quicken his pace, hooves eating up the beaten track at a lurching gallop.

Something in the hum of the amulet seemed to draw him ceaselessly on. He blindly followed where it drew him without question until dawn began to lighten the horizon.

Then, he followed the black pillar of smoke pluming into the pale sky.

* * *

To see the signs of the battle, to feel it in the hum of the amulet that drew him on and yet to still be a day’s ride or more away, left Jaskier feeling brittle and wrung tight as though he would stretch until snapped.

The heartbeat he felt against the bare skin of his chest or beating against his knuckles when he cupped the amulet in his hands had evened out for the most part but at times spiked wildly again, fast as a rabbit’s, and in those times he pressed on harder still.

 _Have to get to her. Have to. Have to_ , he thought and was sorry for his horse’s sake for the relenting pace he set, Little Sir’s mouth gaping and reins frothing his neck white with sweat. But then, he felt the flutter of her heartbeat rise again, and he could not feel sorry for long.

He did finally have to rest around midday, halting along the shaded pool of a woodland creek that the road forded. He stumbled from Little Sir’s back and almost fell at the quiver of his thighs, and the horse’s big hooves churned the mud at the shore as Jaskier led him down to drink. The chestnut stallion pressed his muzzle deep into the cool shallows, and Jaskier squatted alongside him to cup water in his hands and suck against the line of his fingers, ignoring the tremble of his legs that threatened to pitch him forward into the water.

The pair drank their fill in the silence of the babbling creek and whistle of bird song, sunlight mottling across the brown water and the man crouched beside his horse. It looked to be a pleasant day, an autumn afternoon that almost had the feeling of midsummer if one ignored the edge of brown to the leaves, the signs of light frosts that had faded the foliage of any plant not sheltered beneath the boughs of the trees.

It was the sort of day he had once enjoyed well for travelling, either all those years with the Witcher or rambling about the Continent on his own. Lute in hand, striding out along the hard-packed road without a care, his only worry in avoiding the drying mud puddles that threatened to stain the heels of his new shoes and crisp stockings.

In those days, he would have rested here by this creek half the day, strumming in the crook of the gnarled beech tree along the bank, delighting in the trill of his own voice rising among the leaves. He may have slept there in the branches or among the roots of the tree as the day passed on, roused himself in the evening to swan off to the next town for a warm meal and a bit of carousing.

How simple things were in those days. And yet, he did not miss it, not even for the exhaustion in his muscles and the creeping ache of hunger that he knew would only get worse.

Yennefer’s heartbeat eclipsed any weariness.

He lay a hand on Little Sir’s tree trunk of a leg, pale feathers gone black with muck, half to stay upright and half to take comfort in the familiar tufts of hair along the back of his mount’s knee.

“Good Sir,” he said, noticing belatedly that there was water seeping into his boots as he crouched in the shallow creek. “Sir, I’m going to have to ask a bit more of you. I apologize, my good Sir, but I can’t-- if she’s--” The horse lifted his head from the water, whiskers dripping, and looked at him with mellow brown eyes. “I don’t know what I’ll even do when I get there but if she’s--”

Little Sir’s big head turned to press into his chest, blonde eyelashes fluttering against his cheek, and Jaskier gripped him to keep from falling on his ass in the mud and then clung. He choked on his breath, threatening to go ragged with sobs, but he didn’t have the time for them. He didn’t know what he would find on the fire-stricken battlefield, but something drew him to make haste to arrive there.

He had felt--

Well, something in the pulse of the amulet whispered to him, as clearly as if it had been spoken in his ear. That Yennefer was hurt, Yennefer was in danger. He didn’t know if she had intended this in gifting it to him. He knew she would not approve of this wild scramble toward what very well could be an active battlefield.

But to sit by in the little cottage and wait would kill him as surely as any Nilfgaardian soldier would. He feared, desperately, that he would feel a stutter against his chest that fell to stillness. He could not stand even the thought of it, a clawing ache tightening its hold on his lungs.

He could rest no longer.

Scrambling back into the saddle took some effort, his boots squelching in the stirrups in a less than pleasant manner. Little Sir hardly had to be asked to swing into a rolling canter along the road.

The smoke had faded to wisps along the treeline.

He rode on to Yennefer, relentlessly, desperately. To whatever terrible swell of destruction he knew awaited him. To whatever dreadful state he may find her in. And if he rode on toward his own doom, to the very last ragged breath in his lungs.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> jaskier is a horse girl in these trying times


	23. Chapter 23

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jaskier arrives on a blackened battlefield.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i have squinted at the witcher wiki page for 20 hours and decided actually nothing is canon except yennefer & jaskier being in love and i'm allowed a little hand-wavey "and then nilfgaard fucked off from whence they came for the time being"

Grey morning light broke over a charred expanse of ground, a blackened swathe that stretched for what felt like miles across a broad area that Jaskier knew had once been rolling farmland scattered with pockets of forest. Now flat and barren.

The mud-caked hooves of the exhausted horse stirred up flutters of ashes as the churn of clouds overhead began to spatter out fat raindrops. Here and there, pockets of coals or ripples of scant flames still glowed, and even from his height on the big stallion’s back, he could feel a deep warmth rising from the fire-baked earth.

The smell of wet cinders and fading smoke could not quite overpower the scent of burnt flesh.

He had rested the evening before in a hollow just off the trail, collapsing into a fitful sleep as he waited on morning. Everything within him told him to keep on, to find her, to get to her, but even with the help of the thrumming amulet, he could not safely navigate along the pitch-black of the countryside. Little Sir was not sure-footed enough even on a good day to avoid finding a rabbit warren in the dark.

And so, they rested.

When dawn began to lighten the surrounding forest, Jaskier foraged some wild grapes from a twisting vine that choked the edge of the hollow while Little Sir tugged at undergrowth.

Yennefer’s heartbeat thumped steady and slow in his fist.

Ignoring the settling aches in his body from the night curled on the packed earth and the deeper, terrified ache in his chest, he mounted again and rode on.

On the black expanse of the battlefield, there were no signs of life but for dark-feathered scavenger birds, no sound but the flap of their wings and guttural cries. The rustle of ashes stirred into vortexes by a rising wind.

But he pressed on, knowing he would find her here. He would find her.

In what state, he could not say.

* * *

Jaskier had hardly sighted the rumpled canvas of the tent over the rise of the next hill when he hit a rippling curtain of magic and a flurry of activity burst along the rise.

What followed involved him hollering _I’m unarmed! I’m unarmed!_ at a line of archers with arrows notched in his direction as Little Sir snorted and side-stepped. His frantic ride would have no doubt ended very abruptly and bloodily if not for the thrum of the amulet against his chest that told him she was near, she was so close, _she was here_.

“Yennefer! _Yennefer!_ ” he shouted, his voice pitched high in his desperation, drawing up on the horse’s reins to try to keep him steady. He couldn’t even say if this tent belonged to friend or foe, though the archers looked far too bedraggled and soot-stained to be Nilfgaardian soldiers.

He knew he needed to say something more coherent than faltering cries of her name to avoid a swift end on this godsforsaken battleground, but he could not find the words, buoyed by the terror that he would not be able to reach her, that she was lost to him, that the agony he felt rising from the amulet clutched in a white-knuckled hold would kill the both of them.

“ _Yennefer!_ ”

A woman stepped between the readied archers, her back rod-straight and expression severe, and she raised a hand to request their weapons be lowered, taut strings relaxed.

Jaskier shivered as he felt the mage’s mind probe over his, a sensation like the sharp talons of a hawk brushing against its prey but not catching, and when she spoke, it was as clear as if she stood right in front of him. Her mouth did not move.

“You must be Julian,” she said in a voice both haughty and guarded. “Come. She has been asking for you.”

He wasted no time in falling from the horse’s back and scrabbling up the hill.

* * *

This tent was not bigger on the inside, a long stretch of hastily-erected fabric that sheltered dozens of the wounded and dying lain out on cots or bedrolls or moth-eaten blankets, lit by the flickering light of a central firepit.

There seemed to be far more prone figures than those that flit about tending to them.

Some were clearly soldiers, blood-stained armor adorned in the Temerian coat of arms, others peasant women, even children, and of course, there were the mages.

The woman, Tissaia, led him among them, stepping around and sometimes over the huddled bodies. Most had not yet woken, no sound but the whisper of pained breaths. _Or would never wake,_ he thought and felt a prickle of sorrow at the corners of his eyes.

A badly-burned woman trembled with sobs in the arms of another who hushed and rocked her. A man across from them lay open-eyed and slack-faced, perfectly still but for the occasional rise of his breast. And along the far wall of the tent curled a familiar figure, crumpled and swathed in bloodied bandages, so very small, _oh gods_ , so small.

“Yen?” His broken cry roused her from sleep, and he felt the wild spike of her heart rate against his sternum. His knees hit the earth beside her with a painful lurch that he hardly noticed, not as she turned, bleary-eyed and feverish to attempt to grasp at him with swaddled hands.

“Julian?” she whispered, her voice cracked and dry. “Julian? _Julian._ ”

“Shit, Yen, I’m here. It’s me,” he babbled as he looked at her, taking in her tangled hair, the blood and grime smeared across her face, the unfocused roving of her violet eyes. “What’s wrong with her?” he barked at the woman that stood above them. “What _happened_?”

Tissaia kneeled at her other side and drew a soothing touch along her damp forehead, and Yennefer jerked toward her as though to fight back, Tissaia catching her raised wrists as her clenched jaw loosened, her fitful shuddering going still as she faded back into sleep.

Tissaia had someone bring him a waterskin and a ration of gristled jerky, and then, she settled to tell him the whole story. Of their occupation of the keep, their dwindling numbers, the assault that broke the gates and nearly ruined them, how Yennefer had stood alone on the cusp of a dark hill and hailed fire and brimstone down upon the gathered army, how Temerian forces had relieved them soon after and pushed Nilfgaard south and away.

“I have never seen anything so extraordinary,” said Tissaia. Her eyes were somewhere distant.

“I know what you mean,” he said as he looked at Yennefer’s sleeping form.

Thought of her with the tendons jumping in her wrists and fingers curling as bandits crumpled into the earth before her. Imagined how utterly transfixing she would have looked limned in flames, raising a brilliant conflagration across the war-torn field and snuffing her enemies to smoke. He knew just what she meant.

“She only did as I told her,” the woman said with a bit of that prim sternness cracking around the edges. Her chin trembled as she stared down at where she still kept hold of Yennefer’s wrists, careful of her bandaged hands. “I knew she was the only one among us who could do such a thing. She was but a child when I first saw her draw pure chaos into herself and expel it. I knew she was capable. She only did as I asked.”

“Not just because you asked,” said Jaskier, a softness in the hush of his voice. He reached to touch Yennefer’s dark hair, just the flat of his fingerpads against the soft strands, sweeping her fringe away from her sleeping face. “Because she gives so much of herself. Even as she claims to want everything from the world, she gives just as much to those she cares most about. A vessel spilling over with it. Going empty.”

“Quite a poet,” said Tissaia with a faint twitch of her lips.

“As I live and breathe,” said Jaskier.

She regarded him with a narrowing of her gaze. Embarrassment warmed him as he remembered he still wore only his threadbare sleepclothes and surely looked a sight after his days-long ride and night spent sleeping in the dirt, not a lick of finery except the amulet that hung in the part of his open neckline. Tissaia’s eyes caught on it and flicked to meet his.

“What are you to her?” she asked, and he could see her assessing him, the astute sharpening of her focus. He knew how mages worked, knew she wished to dip again into his thoughts as she had briefly on the battlefield.

“See for yourself,” he said with a hand-wavey gesture of permission. “I know you want to.”

So, Tissaia did.

It didn’t quite feel like his skull cleaved open under her scrutiny, but it also was not pleasant. He could feel her, probing and pressing, and though everything within his body told him to resist the strange sort of friction, scalp prickling and hair on his arms standing on end, he allowed the intrusion. He flung doors wide, inviting the strange woman to see Yennefer as he saw her. Their ride down from the mountains. Their life together. The little cottage by the sea. The way she looked on peaceful mornings at his side with the steam from her mug of tea wisping up into her lowered face.

“Oh,” said Tissaia with a curt nod, and her mind drew away from his.

Jaskier sucked in a breath at the sudden vertigo it brought him and was startled to realize her eyes had gone wet along the rims. One of her hands loosened from Yennefer’s wrists and fumbled to grip his, clasping together over the sleeping woman who seemed so tiny and frail between them.

“What did you see?” he asked, and she clenched his fingers tighter.

“She already has it,” Tissaia said, just above a whisper.

“What?”

“ _Everything._ ”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ouch me wee little heart. me wee tiny little heart


	24. Chapter 24

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jaskier begins to help Yennefer recover in whatever small ways that he can.

“She should regain her sight,” said Tissaia, kneeling at Yennefer’s side. The tent had begun to wake around them, breakfast being prepared over the firepit, patients roused and tended to. Jaskier accepted a warm bowl of gruel pressed into his hand by a young girl who offered the same to Tissaia. “But for now, she’s…”

“Blind?” asked Jaskier, settling the bowl into his lap. Tissaia nodded.

“Rather more reliant on others than she’s used to,” she said. “You know how she is.”

“Oh, I certainly do,” he said. She would be hellish, prickly in her vulnerability and quick to snap at any affront to her agency.

“Magic that powerful requires a great cost. A lesser mage than Yennefer would have succumbed to it,” she said. Jaskier found he could not remove his eyes from her sleeping face, catching on the little wrinkle of pain between her brows, the part of her full lips. “Her other injuries will sort themselves out given time. Same as non-magical wounds. But the magical exhaustion should wear off in a day or two. ”

“And then I can take her home? If she'd like?”

Her gaze caught his, warmth seeping in around the edges of a gentle smile. She had the look of a woman who didn’t smile like that too often, if at all.

“Yes,” she said. “She will be glad to go home, I would say.” Unspoken was _I am endlessly glad that she has found a home in you_ , but he heard it buzz about in his head anyway.

“Will she--?” His fingers brushed across the strips of tight bandages that mitted her hands. “Will she be scarred?”

“Not badly,” said Tissaia. “At least not physically.”

And wasn’t that just typical, he thought. His Yennefer, skin forever remaining unmarred but for the fading, raised welts along both wrists, but nearly as scarred as the Witcher all the same.

* * *

For two days, Yennefer slept, sometimes shivering on the brink of waking, urged quiet by a brush of Tissaia’s hand, and other times, gone still, curled in on herself.

Through the nights, Jaskier slept with his head on her breast to hear the thump of her heartbeat. Though he could feel the same rhythm through the amulet that hung around his neck, it did not soothe like the real thing.

Through the days, he tried his best to help about the camp, but he was no healer and no priest. He could not offer fresh supplies nor skill in sewing or cooking or more arcane arts.

Those remaining here were only the worst wounded and the dying, the rest portalled or carried off, but portals and complicated alchemy and the summoning of supplies sapped energy that the dwindling few healthy mages did not have to spare. And the healers could not focus all their attention here while the Temerian army pushed south and the list of casualties grew along the front.

The most Jaskier could do was go where he was pointed, and of course, to sing a rousing folk ditty or two when requested, those who were well enough clapping heartily along.

And late at night before a low-banked fire, he offered up something more poignant, tremulous notes rising in the settling dark of the tent. Some old funeral song, author long dead, that spoke of many-splendored halls for those stolen in battle, their pain forgotten and memory never fading from the world.

As a young man, he had loved it for its melancholy, its bittersweet ache. But he had never wept in singing it the way he wept in that tent on the edge of a charred field.

He wept again pressing his face against the rough wool blanket snugged up to Yennefer’s chin.

In the morning, she awoke.

As expected, once the heavy exhaustion had sloughed off her, Yennefer sat propped up along the far wall of the tent stuck in a deeply sour mood. Arms folded tight across her chest and bandaged hands tucked under her elbows, she surveyed the bustle of activity as though perched on a gilded throne to observe her subjects, peering down her nose. Only a well-trained eye would notice that she struggled to track movement, that someone drawing too close without making a sound startled her, that her violet eyes could not quite focus.

Jaskier noticed, of course.

As he assisted the cooks in distributing midday’s meal of watered down venison and potato stew, he was struck by the knowledge of how little time had passed since their ride down from the mountain together. Scarcely a few seasons, such a small sputter of time for those of elven blood or even for human lovers.

And yet, the ways he knew her little tells and quirks, could read her mood by the twitch of her mouth, inspired a fond pool of warmth in his belly. He knew her. She had allowed him to know her. He felt giddy with it, could scarcely stop watching her knowing that she would not catch him looking, thrilled to see her little microexpressions that allowed him to guess at what she was feeling.

Frustrated, mostly. The tightening of her jaw and grimace of her expression said this clearly. But also, the exaggerated set of her chin, the fold of her arms across herself said _scared_.

Noticing these things meant that he could help her.

Except that he hadn’t the faintest clue how to do so.

Except that she had ridden away from their life together, and he could have no guarantee that she even wanted him near. In her desperation, sure, she had whispered _Julian_ , had whimpered and allowed him to hold her, but now that she was more cognizant, did she still feel the same?

She had fled from him, from Fate, had said _I cannot trust it_ , and Jaskier knew he also could not trust the ways she had reached for him when she was vulnerable.

But damn it all, Jaskier wanted to. Destiny be damned, bonds of magic and twisting fates, he wanted to be someone she clung to in her desperate moments. He wanted to be someone who noticed her pain, if not to soothe it away than simply to acknowledge it. Even if she never let him near again. Even if she would not ride home with him to the coast.

To let her know that she was loved and seen, perhaps not in so many words, perhaps not in words at all, would have to be enough.

She did not notice him approach, her violet eyes staring beyond him, unseeing.

“Yen,” he said softly when he neared her, hoping not to surprise her, but by the subtle tensing of her shoulders and grit of her teeth he knew that he had. “Sorry,” he said and crouched down, pressed a bowl of stew into her bandaged hand and guided the other to the wooden spoon settled against the rim. The little wrinkle between her brows deepened for a blink, and he knew how deeply she hated to feel so reliant on others for something as simple as locating a spoon, as feeding herself.

The most he could do for her now was try not to make that feeling worse. To oblige her and keep his distance for the sake of her pride. Her stiff, tightly-bandaged hands would make navigating eating something as simple as a bowl of stew more difficult than usual, but he knew she would not take kindly to being treated like a child. He had seen her refuse help from others again and again through the morning, swatting them all away with deepening annoyance and frustration.

He could do this much for her. If nothing else.

As he made to stand, she lurched forward suddenly, stew slopping over the edge of the bowl. She reached blindly with an outstretched hand, striking only air at first and then thumping against his upper arm, his chest. Her eyes roved, staring somewhere off over his shoulder, and she thumped his arm again for good measure.

“Stay,” she said, her voice rasping terribly, vocal chords still healing from the howling screams of agony the magic had torn from her. “Stay, little bird.” Her voice broke to a whisper on the tender moniker.

He touched his fingers to the edge of her chin. Only the intake of her breath showed that it had startled her. He tipped her chin toward him with a gentle hand, so that she no longer stared somewhere over his shoulder, so that if not for the distant glaze of her eyes, she would be looking directly into his.

“Do you need some help?” he asked, hardly daring to hope, and the corners of her lips crumpled just slightly, a minuscule shift of facial muscles that smoothed out in an instant. But he let out the breath he had been holding in a rush before she answered, knowing what she would say before she spoke.

“Yes,” she whispered, and he settled down before her. Slowly took the bowl of stew from her lap and lifted a spoonful to her lips, murmuring a quiet _open now_ as he did so. She obeyed, keeping her face turned toward where he had directed, eyes steady.

He could almost pretend, even in her blindness, that she saw him in return.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *clenches chest* they love each other so much they just love each other so much


	25. Chapter 25

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *pretends to know a lot about witcherverse geography*

On the fourth day after the battle, the company broke camp. A bevy of soldiers had arrived to guide those remaining on to civilization, requisitioning carts and wagons from nearby villages to carry the worst of the wounded.

The charred corpses on the battlefield had begun to take on a ripe stench in the sun, and though their glowing torches and posted guards kept most necrophages beginning to swarm the blackened land at bay, there was greater safety to be found behind city walls.

Yennefer sat in sullen silence listening to the bustle around her, unable to see much more than shifting shadows. The vision loss had improved since she first blinked awake in the dark and the healers reassured her of her plight being temporary, but that was not much comfort in the meantime.

“Hey,” said Jaskier’s voice close by suddenly, and she did her best to turn to face him, hopefully not betraying that he had snuck up on her. He became annoyingly apologetic when realizing he had startled her. “Sorry, sorry,” he said and sat down beside her, their thighs brushing, hand settling on her arm. “I keep forgetting to stomp about more so you can hear me come up. Old habits.”

“You’re very noisy,” said Yennefer. “No one would ever have any trouble hearing you.”

None of the others seemed to notice how frequently she was caught unawares by a sudden intrusion, but she was never able to deceive Jaskier. Or perhaps the others did notice and chose to say nothing. Pitying her.

If she concentrated, closed her eyes against the patterns of light and dark shifting in her vision, she could falteringly pick out the sounds around her.

Nearby, a horse stamped its hooves against the assault of biting insects, bit jangling as it shook its head to rid them from its ears as well. There was the creak and groan of heavy-laden carts beginning to set out along the dirt track, the distant hum of conversation, the tightening of ropes and settling of chests and sacks of supplies.

With magic, things would be easier. She had never studied such a thing, but there were certainly dozens of ways to sharpen her other senses while her vision lagged behind. But Tissaia had warned her to rest, not to try to draw too deeply on the magic of the world, and besides, to search for a solution would no doubt require poring over dusty manuscripts that she couldn’t read or even locate in this state.

She certainly was not about to go through the mortifying ordeal of asking someone to read some old tome to her like she was an infant being lulled into sleep.

It took her a beat to notice the only sound missing in the activity around her was the rise and fall of Jaskier’s inane chatter.

He sat in silence beside her, their arms pressed together from shoulder to elbow, knees brushing. Following a hunch, she reached a bandaged hand beside her to find his own hands lying in his lap. Perfectly still.

“What’s wrong?” she asked. Silence and stillness did not bode well for him. It signaled that he’d gone off somewhere in his head, and that somewhere was usually woefully stupid.

“You’ll go on then,” he said. “With the others?”

“I suppose,” she said. Though the thought of being held back by the slog of wagons through the countryside did not sit well with her. She itched to be away from here. Missed her lavender tea brewed in the mornings and the waft of the ocean breeze through the cottage window.

“They’re going on to Brugge, last I’d heard. Not the most scenic of vacation spots but--” He faltered. “Er… scenic’s not the best choice of words at the moment, is it?”

“Jaskier,” she said. “I’m blind, not an invalid. I won’t weep if I’m reminded of it. Can hardly forget.”

“Right.”

“We could travel with them for a time, if you’re worried,” she said. “Afraid I’m not the most useful travel companion at the moment, but if we mind which roads we choose and be discreet, we are unlikely to meet trouble. There's a front supposed to hit soon. I’d like to make it to Redania before the snows begin to fall.”

“Where?”

“Redania,” she said. “Northern kingdom. Figured you were familiar.”

“Not Brugge?”

“What would ever possess me to head to _Brugge_? Or possess you, for that matter. It’s a piddling nothing of a kingdom. Dreadfully boring.”

“Yen,” he said, voice pitched low. “I thought-- I mean…” He broke off, did not say what he had thought.

She was missing something.

Her inability to see his facial expression drove a fresh wedge of frustration into her chest. She knew by his manner and by the subtle note of defeat in his voice that there was something stewing in his mind, something dark and foolish, and she struggled to guess at it.

Kneeling in the dark, she searched the faint shadow that was Jaskier beside her. She could see, faintly, what could be the round of his shoulder, and lifted a hand to touch. Not his shoulder, his head bowed forward. The bandages that swathed her hands muffled the feel of his soft strands of hair.

Somewhere out on the field, a raven croaked. The horse nearby had taken to tugging at the grass, its jaw working in short nips.

She remembered very little of what occurred immediately following the battle, only mumbled fits and snatches of conversation, pain, pain in liquid pulses up her arms, a throbbing ache in her head, and an enduring weariness. Sometimes the brush of a hand against her forehead, the thrum of magic through her. _Dreams. Painless sleep._

She dreamed of a muddied road, two horses plodding alongside one another. A high bark of laughter in the wake of a bawdy tune. Blue eyes widened in mirth, the white flash of teeth in his playful grin. Their knees bumping together. The road going on and on without rest and Yennefer wishing for it not to end, to ride on with the melodic strumming of a lute carrying across the open fields around them, to hear him sing to her another song and yet another.

Waking to his warm weight against her side and his mumbled _mornin', sleepyhead_ , she had thought it another dream. One without images this time, a sucking pit of blackness with only his touch, his voice. The sweep of his thumb against her wrist. His quiet muttering that he would go and fetch the rectoress so he didn’t bungle the explanation.

Tissaia and the healers reassured her. She would regain her vision. No lasting damage to the workings of the eye itself, simply a matter of the mind. Which, to Yennefer, sounded very much like something she was just not willing herself hard enough to overcome. It was _her_ mind, after all. How dare it resist her.

And Jaskier had told of his mad ride from Redania to Sodden, of his great lug of a horse somehow turning half a week’s journey into barely two days, and most perplexingly, of the amulet guiding him to her.

She had not charmed it so.

It should have been a form of simple long distance correspondence, nothing more. Her heartbeat. Her voice, if need be. No tracking spell, no mental links.

And yet.

She had allowed the truth to settle around her, then, as he finished his story.

Not all bindings choked and imprisoned. Whatever held them together could be nothing so tainted.

By the gentle ways he cared for her in the days after, she had thought that he understood this. What she had realized.

She trusted him. With her pain, her vulnerability, her wounded pride in requesting help.

But she had not told him. She had thought-- but she had thought wrong. _By_ _the gods_ , and she called _him_ an imbecile.

“Redania,” Yennefer said. “North of Novigrad. There’s a little cottage there.” She cupped his neck to pull her to him, encircling an arm around his bent shoulders. “On the edge of the coast.”

“ _Yen,_ ” he breathed.

“Ride with me?”

His cheek smeared wet where it pressed against hers. She shushed him, pulling him tighter into the embrace.

“What about-- what about being bound to me? To Geralt? What about Fate?” he asked, sounding bewildered, voice pitched high.

“I told you that night, Jaskier,” she said. Her fumbling hands found the amulet. Pressed it flat into his chest. “I trust _you_. Fate can get fucked. But I trust you.”

“You trust me,” he repeated, and he clung to her, hands fisting in the back of her shirt. She ached to see his face.

“If I’m to be bound to anyone,” she said. “I would want it to be someone that I…”

“Someone you trust,” he finished and drew her mouth to his.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *flails*


	26. Chapter 26

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Yennefer and Jaskier travel home together.

After a prolonged hand clasping with Tissaia that devolved into an awkward but long-deserved farewell embrace, Yennefer and Jaskier set out on the road together.

With her own mare still stabled at Aretuza, they had only Jaskier’s plodding stallion to share.

At first, Yennefer refused to accept a leg up into the saddle, intent on proving herself to be perfectly capable of mounting under her own power. She was not some delicate maid that had to be carefully settled onto a gleaming palfrey’s back for fear she would wrinkle her skirts.

Problem being, Little Sir dwarfed even the most strapping palfrey, and she ended up stuck with one leg hoisted up into the stirrup, bouncing pitifully on her other leg as though that meager momentum would somehow allow her to force her exhausted muscles to scale the mountain of a horse. Her only blessing was that she knew most of the company had already gone on, just Jaskier left to watch her flounder.

He said nothing as she finally relented to being given a leg up, did not say _I told you so,_ simply offered one hand for her boot and hooked an arm under her thigh, hefting her comparatively slight weight up into the saddle with surprising ease. Ignoring how flustered such a small thing made her, Yennefer took up her stirrups and reached for the reins only not to find them slung about the horse’s neck.

Jaskier made no move to follow her into the saddle, apparently set on leading the horse at a walk while she rode, and that just wouldn’t do.

“Don’t be a fool,” she said. “I won’t be ponied like some babe while you wear down the soles of your good boots. It’s all I’ll hear about for weeks.” She extended a hand for him, able to see only the rough shape of his silhouette, did her best to hide the jump when his fingers brushed against her own. “Get up here, you little bastard.”

“Alright, alright,” he breathed as he adjusted the reins and slung himself up behind her with an embarrassing grace given her own pitiful failed attempt at scrambling up the beast’s side.

Little Sir was plenty strong enough to carry the both of them on his broad back, but the saddle design left little space between their hips. Though Jaskier pressed as far back as the high cantle allowed, their thighs still snugged tight together, his chest a solid presence against the length of her spine. The arms that encircled her to grip the reins left her mostly immobilized in his warm hold.

It should have felt infantilizing to ride before a man in such a way. She should have felt trapped and furious and humiliated.

But Jaskier was not just any man, and she knew he would extend to her all the space in the world if she only asked. She felt no desire to ask, settling against his chest. As her head tipped back, he nosed into her hair and pressed a fleeting kiss there, and it should have been utterly mortifying the way that small gesture sent her heart rate fluttering, especially knowing he would feel it in the thrum of the amulet he still wore. Could probably have felt it anyway, given their proximity.

Instead, as they set out along the road, all she could interpret from the tangle of her emotions was _safe_.

Distinctly unsettled by the disorientation of trotting through a dark fog, unable to see the countryside slide past around them, Yennefer mumbled a request that Jaskier describe it to her. Which she recognized immediately as a mistake, given his avid lust and vigor for extravagant prose and belly-aching.

“Overcast skies. Just the faintest hint of watery sunlight through the clouds. Darker along the western horizon, bit of a storm brewing,” narrated Jaskier, his lips against her hair. Even without her sight, Yennefer could smell the coming rain, feel the faint shift of atmospheric pressure. “Can’t say I’ll mind it if it stops all this bloody dust.”

“You’ll mind it,” said Yennefer. “You’ll whine about the rain same as anything.”

“I don’t _whine_ ,” he protested. “I’m simply narrating. You said you wanted to me to describe our surroundings in detail.”

“More description. Less yapping.”

“Well I very well can’t do both,” he huffed but returned to his narration. “Road’s narrower here. Just a rolling footpath. Barley fields. Or is that rye? Harvest’s been delayed by the war, I suppose.”

“Don’t pretend like you know a thing about agriculture.”

“I’ll have you know I studied agriculture long and hard in my youth.”

“Tumbling a farmer’s daughter in the hay loft does not count.”

“Farmer’s _son_ , and it was the silage shed,” said Jaskier. “The hay loft was later on. With his mum.”

“You’re completely incorrigible. Genuinely awful.”

“Ah, but no longer,” he said as he rested his chin against her shoulder, his voice lowering with a wistful tenderness. “I’m a married man now.”

“You-- shut up and narrate, bard,” said Yennefer, feeling her ears burn with the shame of being struck by how good that sounded.

“Definitely rain along the horizon now, all grey-blue and streaky. Like a fresh bruise. Don’t think it will reach us. Not just yet. Ah, but the road wanders through a stand of trees just round the bend. Wind catching in their branches, leaves starting to flush with autumn. The grass fading bronze. Some small pink flowers as well. Flat petals.”

“Campion,” said Yennefer.

“Clusters of blue ones also, very delicate. Little sprays here and there.”

“Forget Me Nots.”

“And more pink ones. Tufted. On tall stalks.”

“Betony.”

And on they went like that together.

Toward home.

* * *

Her sight improved steadily as autumn deepened into winter, so that she could make out the glow of the fire in the hearth, the white expanse of snow that blanketed the seaside and buried the little cottage, the blue of Jaskier’s eyes if she focused intently enough.

She focused most intently, until he laughed and said her eyes would stick crossed like that if she kept at it, and so, settled in his lap, she focused instead on resting her forehead against his bare neck as his voice rose and fell, reading aloud to her from one of his books of verse.

By midwinter, they had exhausted his store of poetry and moved on to his collection of appallingly terrible romances, the plots of which all shared the same thread of lascivious prose and baffling descriptions of anatomy. Jaskier read with theatric, breathy aplomb, and Yennefer snorted every other sentence, culminating in the both of them collapsed into one another with gasps of laughter, hardly able to draw wheezing breaths.

She had never giggled like a schoolgirl even as a schoolgirl.

She had not thought she could love another so fiercely, so disastrously, so completely.

At least not without a sickening dread tightening in her stomach.

The winter spent cozied within the cottage allowed for no dread or fear. Any clinging moments of insecurity were soon assuaged, any doubts swept away in the wake of heated embraces, any words left unspoken whispered as heartfelt promises beneath the warm cocoon of blankets in their shared bed.

By the time a steady thaw had turned the countryside into a wet slog, melting snow trickling off the eaves, Yennefer’s sight had returned to its usual shrewd clarity, and yet, the habit developed over the winter of sticking as close to one another as possible did not dissipate.

Always her hand pressed into the small of his back, their shoulders bumping together, his arms cradling her from behind as he crooned into the juncture of her neck and swayed.

How strange to be so enveloped in another person, body and mind. To know that he saw her at her most mundane and unembellished, eyes crusty with sleep in the mornings, mouth sour with drink in the evenings, and still, he looked at her with such unfettered adoration.

She loathed to think what could be seen in her own expression in those moments, but by the glisten of his eyes, his little gasps and fluttering kisses against the burn of her cheeks, she knew whatever he saw to be wholly embarrassing, utterly mawkish, earnestly soppy.

* * *

And then, one ordinary spring morning, her wards flickered along the edge of the hills.

And the Witcher strode back into their lives.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> me, writing this chapter:


	27. Chapter 27

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this chapter has a handful of explicit moments
> 
> also I realize that the Witcher is largely not capitalized but i'm a slut for big letters

Yennefer rose from their tangle of bedclothes, carefully dislodging the warm arm from about her waist. The trail of her nightgown fluttered against her bare calves as she tiptoed across the chilled floorboards to stoke the fire back to life in the hearth and set a pot of herbal tea to brew.

Fingers of magic teased out to track the Witcher as his mare picked her way along the narrow track that led to the cottage. Yennefer knew the ramshackle thing could be seen from well off in its position on the edge of the coast, that he would sight the wisps of smoke rising from the chimney, would be scrutinizing every detail in that slow way of his even as he approached.

She could, if she so chose, shut him out as easily as anything. At her word, the cottage would appear abandoned, fallen into disrepair, the shutters hanging loose and the tumble of flowers from the windowboxes rustling as dried husks in the breeze. Cold ashes in the hearth. Empty bookshelves, a bare mattress, cobwebs choked with dust.

Yennefer had made no attempts to hide her presence here, did not actually wish to hide, and he would no doubt see through the illusion. Had seen the lively spill of gardens already and the smoke from the chimney.

But the message would be clear. _You will not be permitted to find me. Do not continue looking._

She waited, considering it. At a word, he could open the cottage door and find nothing but dust. A protective rush rose in her breast at the thought of the Witcher’s presence intruding on this small life here, this little glimpse of joy. She remembered the stillness that had haunted the bard on the way down the mountain, how even in barely knowing him or truly caring, it had sat wrong in her gut.

This life was _theirs_ , and they had fought for it, they had bled for it, had eked out a home here together even in the face of their combined efforts to thwart and resist it at every turn. This life was _hers_. The bard was _hers_.

She could allow the Witcher to pass on, could turn him away, could refuse to allow him even a glimpse of their happiness, could wake Julian after he had long gone and not tell him a thing about it, not allow even a flicker of that pained look to creep back into his expression.

She could do this for him. She could protect him.

Her wards worked similarly to Geralt's acute senses, rippling across him, catching on the small details, dipping just deeply enough to read intention, to scent for danger.

The Witcher read as _harmless_. She could taste his trepidation, his reluctance to come here, a small flicker of uncertainty that in an ordinary man she would have read as fear.

The girl that rode before him read as _danger_ , brilliant and pulsating, and in the same breath nearly bowled her over with the depths of _fear, grief, pain_ so sharp for one so young. And through it all a strong thread of _trust_ directed toward the Witcher that sheltered her in his cloak.

The kettle began to whistle just as the mare crested the last ridge, and by the time the Witcher had dismounted before the cottage, she had settled in with her steaming mug set on the table before her.

She could yet whisper a word and sit here masked by illusion as he strode through the vibrant gardens and unlatched the door to a cold room that stank of mildew, scurried with roaches.

It was that shimmering vein of trust from the terrified child that drew Yennefer to crack open the weathered door to him instead.

To allow him the privilege of glimpsing their life here.

If only so that he truly knew what he had thrown away, she told herself. If only for the child’s sake. If only for what fun it could be to toy with him as he looked on at the scene unfolding before him.

Julian, sleepy-eyed and affectionate as ever, looking completely foolish in her misfitting silk robe. The Witcher blinking in bewilderment, tensed like a startled creature deciding whether or not to flee.

 _Yes_ , Yennefer thought with a thrill of amusement as her finger skimmed the rim of her mug. _Perhaps this could be good fun indeed._

* * *

The Witcher watched them, puzzling, dissecting, and if Yennefer stepped that bit closer to Julian under his scrutiny, walked with her hand pressed between his shoulderblades, touched him in casual gestures on his arm, his chest, the swell of his hipbone, then it was no different than usual but different all the same. Knowing that Geralt was there to analyze it.

He seemed equal parts confounded and uncomfortable. He kept it well-hidden beneath grimaces, grunts, and carefully blank stares, but Yennefer knew him well enough to see his restless confusion. The Witcher was completely out of sorts here.

Yennefer enjoyed it very much.

“This joke isn’t very funny anymore,” said Geralt one night at the dinner table.

Julian looked between them, brow wrinkled.

“Personally,” said Yennefer. “I think it’s very, very funny.”

In the garden the next day, Julian stopped her with a tug on her hand, glancing back at the direction the Witcher had headed into the hills with the girl earlier in the morning.

“You’re toying with him,” he said. “Why?”

She shrugged.

“It’s amusing,” she said.

“Don’t you think he’s been through enough?”

“No,” she drawled. “He’s been here nearly a week and yet to even mention the terms on which we all parted. Yet to offer up even the inkling of an apology.”

“You haven’t brought it up either,” said Julian. They continued their stroll along the perimeter of the garden, tall stalks of irises and hollyhocks nodding in the wind, their hands entangled together.

“I’m not the one who should be grovelling for forgiveness,” she said. The Witcher had been arrogant and foolish in the hasty wish that bound them, but to his bard, he had been needlessly cruel, selfish, brutish, ugly. _I’m not the one he needs to apologize to,_ she did not say.

Julian heard it anyway, shaking his head.

“Yen, he just takes longer to process the lot of it, is all. Give him time,” he said. “Our Witcher may be clever, but not with things like this. He’ll come to it.”

“Doubtful,” she said.

“I don’t need his apology. I truly don’t,” he said and tightened his hold on her hand briefly. “If he’s willing to offer it, he will have my forgiveness. I’ll be here all the same."

“You’re a good man,” said Yennefer as he lifted her hand to kiss her slender fingertips. “A good friend.”

“One has to try.”

“He doesn’t deserve it.”

Julian’s blue eyes gleamed as he smiled against her palm.

“I know you don’t believe that. I know you’re as soft as I am on our Witcher.”

Yennefer snorted. Opened her mouth to retort that she was allowing this for the girl’s sake, it had nothing to do with Geralt, she would have been perfectly happy never seeing him again after their parting, she didn’t want him here in their space, in their home, privy to peaceful moments like this one.

Instead, she pressed her mouth into a thin line.

How irritating it was sometimes to be known so completely.

* * *

For a girl raised in a Cintran court, Ciri was clever, tough, and quick to speak her mind.

And harboring a dark and primal power that had the potential to rend whole armies in two.

Yennefer was well out of her depth.

“I’d be a completely shit teacher,” said Yennefer, tucked in their bed against Julian’s side, head pillowed on his soft belly as his fingers found the tangles in her dark hair. “Aretuza was a shit school, and all my teachers were shit.” For all she owed Tissaia, it was the truth.

“Well,” he said. She lay her palm flat against his stomach, a mindless sort of touch, her fingers trailing through the hair along his navel. “Sounds like you know how _not_ to teach at the very least.”

She snorted.

And proceeded to teach the girl exactly as Aretuza wouldn’t. With patience and praise. No weight of expectations, no intent to bind her power, to shape her as a political tool.

Simply the four of them in the verdant garden, the lilacs and honeysuckle full in bloom, Ciri bent with her hands pressed to the earth to will the golden petals of a delicate flower to open as its toothed leaves unfurled, to fade to a tufted seedhead and be stolen by the wind.

The girl learned fast and faster still, and spring tripped into summer.

* * *

The Witcher watched.

And, on occasion, listened.

With the little cottage so crowded now and the girl always in earshot, moments of intimacy had to be stolen here and there. Quiet, shifting embraces before the sun quite rose. Hasty rutting when the girl and the Witcher stepped out for long enough. Languid tumbles when they were guaranteed a few hours of uninterrupted peace and quiet.

Uninterrupted only because Geralt stopped just inside the ripple of her wards to listen for them, scenting the breeze. Her magic hummed along the dark ridge of the hill and found _interest, arousal, the sour pang of jealousy_.

She wondered if he even recognized it in himself. She wondered what would coax him to interrupt them. What she would do if he did.

Yennefer was intimately familiar with all the most effective methods of eliciting truly desperate, shameless noises from her little bard. So, if she twisted her wrist or flicked her tongue or sped her rhythm in just such a way to inspire them, knowing that the Witcher could hear, then no one else had to know.

Except that by the glint in Julian’s eyes, his stupid grin, the wanton flush of his cheeks as he arched into a breathy groan, she knew he at least was not fooled.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> chapter count keeps going up because i'm a weak soft tender little bastard


	28. Chapter 28

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> some explicit bits in this chapter as well
> 
> also tw: tenderness

Until he witnessed the gentle, hushed warmth with which Geralt treated Little Cirilla, Jaskier did not realize how easily and how completely he would forgive the man.

Something had changed in Geralt in subtle ways. He had gone after the girl. He had found her. He spoke to her with a level of patience and care that Jaskier had not thought possible. He lay a big hand on the top of her head from time to time and spoke to her in a low voice not tightened by gruffness. Freely gave information about his life and the creatures he hunted and the nature of his world that Jaskier had had to beg for.

He should have been jealous. Perhaps spiteful. That this girl who Geralt hadn’t wanted a thing to do with was granted the gentle attention that Jaskier had always craved from him.

Instead, Jaskier could only describe what he felt when he saw the Witcher and the girl together as _fond_.

Yes, he would forgive Geralt in a breath when he asked.

Some days, Jaskier could hardly recognize him. He had changed since that last glimpse of him on the bare mountain summit. Gone softer around the edges. Some of the tension loosened in his shoulders. His jaw no longer held quite so tightly.

Yes, Jaskier would forgive him. Perhaps already had.

Problem being, of course, that Geralt didn’t ask.

In a myriad of ways, he had not changed one bit. Jaskier could write endless, frustrated verse about his many flaws and failures. Stubborn, stunted, and stupendously _stupid_. Oh, how disastrously awful it was to be so fond of a man so blindingly, desperately clueless. Oh, how merciful and gracious and patient and generous and most benevolent Jaskier was to tolerate such an utter imbecile.

* * *

Geralt slept in their spare room for near forty nights before it finally happened.

“I’m sorry,” he grunted one night after dinner.

 _I forgive you,_ thought Jaskier but looked to Yen across the table instead of saying so. How beautiful she looked with that shine of mischief in her violet eyes.

“The Witcher better not think it will be that easy,” said Yen, and Jaskier hummed.

“He looks about to piss himself though,” he said. “Should we maybe let him say his piece?”

And after a fair bit of needling and entertainment drawn from watching the oversized idiot squirm in discomfort at their dining table, they allowed him to do so.

Geralt apologized. Jaskier forgave.

Less predictably, Yen softened to him with similar ease.

“Do you really forgive him?” he asked later on in their bed. They lay chest to back, Jaskier in front, Yen’s slender arm looped around his waist and palm pressed flat to his sternum. Busy pressing fleeting kisses along the back of his neck, she did not rush to answer.

“Mmmm,” she hummed with her lips pressed just behind his ear. His hair had grown long enough to be tucked behind it, and she shifted her hand to do so, kissing the shell of it and then his temple and the edge of his jaw. “I do,” she said at last, her warm breath drawing a shudder through his body.

“Just like that?”

“You say that like you didn't nearly choke on your own tongue in your haste to accept his apology.”

“Well,” said Jaskier. She had returned to kissing the tendon along his neck in a manner that almost made him forget his line of thought. “You seemed dead set on never letting him live it down.”

“He treated you unfairly,” she said. “I don’t plan on letting him forget that. But his words were sincere. You found them to be enough.”

“And?”

“And I trust you.” A stir of warmth fluttered in his stomach, the same reaction inspired any time she said those words. They meant more than any other loving sentiment or compliment or murmur of adoration. _I love you_ shrank beside the weight of _I know I can be vulnerable when I am beside you_.

A silence crept in that settled to the edge of sleep, her arm snug around his middle, their slow breaths sinking to the same rhythm.

“For a moment,” she said against his neck, breaking the quiet. “I considered not sheltering him here. I could have not allowed him to find us at all. I could have made him ride on.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“I don’t know.”

Jaskier turned in her arms.

“Of course you do. You know very well you can’t lie to me.”

“I very well _can_ ,” retorted Yen as she set her jaw, then realized she had all but admitted to lying and huffed out a laugh despite herself. Jaskier echoed her amusement with a smile that was no doubt woefully embarrassing in its dopey, lovestruck sincerity, but he could hardly bring himself to care.

“Why didn’t you turn them away?” he asked again.

“The girl,” said Yen. “If he is bound to her the same as I am to him, then I thought I owed it to her to help them both.”

“Yen,” he said, shifting above her on his elbow, hoping she could read all the softness he sank into the utterance of her name. She looked up into his face, some detail lost to the dark of the room, but still so terribly beautiful. “Won’t you ever stop thinking of things in terms of who’s bound to who? It doesn’t have to be so complicated.”

“Thought,” she said firmly. “I said I _thought_ I owed her.”

“And now?”

“I see it when they are together. The Witcher and the girl. He cares for her. He is gentle with her,” she said. He nodded, having seen the same. “And I see it when you are with her. When you comfort her. When you try your best to make her laugh. Sing to her.”

“What do you see?” Jaskier asked. His fingertips brushed her chin. In the dim light, her eyes had gone glassy with tears.

“A family,” she breathed. “I see a family. Or the potential for one. Or-- something. _Shit_.” Her voice cracked, and the edges of her mouth twitched down against her will. A single tear blinked free of her lashes and hovered on her cheek. Jaskier bent to kiss it and for Yen, that was simply too much. She crumpled against him.

He shushed her, quick to envelop her in his arms, pulling her until he had her tucked against his chest. She did not cry so much as shook quietly, stubbornly refusing to give voice to her grief, and he rocked her through it, hands stroking through her soft hair and down her back.

“A family,” he whispered where his lips pressed to the crown of her head, and the tremble of her body deepened. He hummed a melody into her hair, the comforting lull of a lullaby, and sleep found them that way, her face wet in the crook of his arm.

* * *

And in Jaskier’s opinion, there was truly no better way than _familial_ to describe the easy dynamic the four of them fell into.

The days were spent with Ciri enduring lessons from all three of her newfound parental figures, and the evenings were bright with laughter and song on the edge of the water, firelight flickering across the sand.

Geralt, for all his former protests, looked as natural a father as anything, and Yennefer took to motherhood just as readily. As much, that is, as the two of them could ever parent the headstrong, whip-smart troublemaker of a girl that Ciri showed herself to be as life in the little cottage allowed her to grow more comfortable.

 _A family_ , thought Jaskier. He loved them all so dearly. His heart _ached_ with it.

In their bed one morning, giving in for once to the summer warmth that tempted them to tumble together amidst the blankets, Yen whispering that her tendrils of magic would alert them should Geralt or Ciri awake, Jaskier said, “I still love him.”

Above him, Yen stilled the roll of her hips only briefly before resuming a slow rhythm, her bare breasts rising and falling with deepening breaths, wisps of hair slicked damp along her forehead, and said, “I know.”

“And?”

“And what?” asked Yen with a shrug as her thighs tensed around him. “Odd time to bring it up, but you’re a very odd man. I’ve grown used to it.”

“Do you love him?”

“Mmmhmm,” she hummed. Pressed a palm against his stomach to shift back to rock him inside her at a different angle that, by the part of her mouth, she found very enjoyable indeed.

“So we both--” he gasped at a particularly sharp downward thrust of her hips. She settled him to the base inside her to grind herself in slow circles against his pubic bone. “We both love him. We both want him.”

“Julian,” said Yen. She leaned to kiss the dark hair at the center of his chest, her eyes flicking up to meet his with a wicked smile tugging at her lips. “My dear Julian are you-- are you suggesting what I think you are?”

“I’m not suggesting anything. I’m asking.”

“Asking if I’d allow the Witcher into our bed?”

“Asking if we could love him. Together. If that’s something you would want.”

“Is it something _you_ would want?”

“Don’t-- just answer the question, Yen.”

She thought about it, her hips still moving in tiny rolls, keeping him hard inside her.

“Doesn’t matter,” she said finally. “He’d never go for it.”

“He just might.”

“He won’t.”

“Well if he _did_?” asked Jaskier. “Pure hypothetical.”

“Yes,” said Yen, and he grasped at her thighs and rolled her beneath him, free to drive into her at a pace that had her arching off the bed, her dark eyelashes fluttering.

“Yes?”

“If the both of you desired it, then, yes," she gasped.

He imagined it. Geralt beside them. Geralt watching. Leaning down to draw Yen into a searing kiss as Jaskier’s thrusts grew erratic, leaning up to kiss Jaskier in turn as his hips stuttered through the thrum of his orgasm.

A fantasy. A hypothetical. He ached with it all the same.

* * *

Summer spilled into autumn.

And then, he woke one morning to the cottage still cold, no fire stoked in the hearth and went out of their bedroom to find Ciri curled against Yen’s breast, sniffling.

Jaskier met Yen’s gaze, and she grimaced. Knew without having to be told what had happened.

He strode across the room to sit close beside them. Let his head fall to rest against Yen's shoulder, an arm stretched to encircle them both.

“He’ll come back,” he said into the quiet of the room, a hushed quality to his voice.

“He’ll come back,” Ciri echoed, muffled in Yen’s side.

* * *

And, miracle of miracles, Geralt did.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> trying to make these little bastards do what i want them to is like trying to coax two terrible cats into a bath and nothing i can do or say will make them stop being tender with one another and confront their feelings for geralt but that's fine who cares about any of this making sense when yen and jaskier can smooch instead


	29. Chapter 29

It took the Witcher until he reached the foothills of the Blue Mountains, the air not yet thinning with the climb, to admit to himself that he had made a terrible mistake.

For one, he had waited too long to leave. A bruised sky churned over the bristling peaks of the mountains, and even as Roach clambered steadfastly up the steepening path, he knew that the pass would be deep with snow by the time he reached it. Already, a cold sleet had begun to fall, slicking the stones underfoot, and the mare had not yet been fitted with the studded shoes that gave her more purchase in the ice and snow.

If he hurried, he may yet make it, but the journey would be a perilous slog. That may just end with one or both of them toppling into an icy abyss or succumbing to the brutal elements.

And wouldn’t that just be typical. Done in not at the hands of a foul creature but by his own foolishness.

Secondly, every muscle in his body itched to turn the horse around and ride hard back to the forlorn little girl standing in the morning quiet of the stables. Perhaps it was Destiny that ran liquid down his spine until he was shivering with it.

Or maybe just regret.

Geralt had not meant her to catch him leaving, had left a scrawled note on the dining table for the three of them and aimed to ride off without fanfare into the dawn. It had taken far more effort than he would readily admit to take the mare’s reins and turn away from the girl, to mount and ride on and away.

He regretted it now. Saw himself turning back. Falling to his knees at the girl’s feet. Pressing her head against her chest, gripping her arms. _Forgive me, forgive me_.

But he hadn’t turned round. Had ridden on at a pace swift enough to reach the foothills within a week. A mistake. But one that was too late to correct.

Worst of all, he thought of the bard and the mage.

He did not regret his choice in trusting the girl to their care.

Their little life together in their cottage by the sea and the girl living there with him. Yennefer acting as a far better mother and teacher than Geralt ever dared himself to believe, and Jaskier settling naturally into fatherhood, equal parts playful and warm and insistent that the girl be allowed a normal childhood with no place for further fear or grief.

A child should grow up in a home full of love and dancing and mischief and singing, and the cottage would do well. Yennefer and Jaskier could do better by her than Geralt ever could.

He did not regret leaving her with them.

But the leaving itself?

One morning, Geralt had awoken in the spare room, a tongue of magic flickering across his skin, heard the murmur of voices and the shifting of bedclothes from the other room. The hum and swell of arousal that he had grown familiar with in his time spent here rising to meet his senses.

Stumbling from the bed, he had been drawn to the curtains along the doorframe, moving them aside to find the curtains that led to the other bedroom equally parted. Saw the pair in bed sprawled together, lost in languid pleasure.

Jaskier, his pale legs fallen open, his hands on Yennefer’s waist as she rose and fell above him. Yennefer, her dark hair spilling down the lithe line of her back. Neither noticing him there, eyes only for each other. Something warm and shameful rose in his belly.

A shame that intensified as their conversation reached his ears.

_“Asking if I’d allow the Witcher into our bed?”  
_

_“Asking if we could love him. Together. If that’s something you would want.”  
  
_ Even as biologically incapable of flushing bright red as Witchers were, Geralt had _burned_.

He stood, eyes pressed closed, a hand fisted in the parted curtains, heartbeat thundering in his ears. But could not help but hear their whispering above it.

_“Yes?”  
  
“If the both of you desired it, then, yes.”_

When he had again opened his eyes, it was to find their positions reversed. Jaskier rolled above her with her spread thighs hitched in his grasp and the muscles in his backside tensing as he thrust. Yennefer’s violet gaze locked with Geralt’s over his freckled shoulder.

 _Geralt_ , brushed a whisper of her voice against his mind. Another tendril of magic, coaxing, prodding. _Do you desire it?_

He could have unlocked the rigid muscles of his legs and stumbled through the curtain. He could have collapsed onto the edge of the bed, hands trembling as he reached for them. Felt the flexing plane of Jaskier’s back. Felt his fingers lock with Yennefer’s.

He could have.

He had not.

Instead, he forced himself to turn away. Dressed. Packed. Stole out to the stables to ready the horse. Brushed off the girl when she interrupted his escape. Mounted. Rode off.

Fled.

Regret shivered in the curl of his fingers around the reins as he guided the mare up the craggy slope. Regret sank his weight into his heels and bowed his shoulders forward, hair hanging limply to cover his face.

He could have done many things. Not spoken those harsh words on the mountain. Uttered a different wish. Accepted a simple, ordinary reward in that Cintran ballroom. Could have. Could have.

Could not turn back now. Not now. Fate marched him on and away, and he’d done his part. He’d protected the girl. He had left her somewhere safe and warm and full of more love than he could ever offer, and that was the sum of it.

But he halted the mare on the cusp of the hill, her bit jangling as her breath plumed white against the grey landscape. Sleet crept down the collar of his shirt and dripped from his hair onto Roach’s withers, and he looked back down the trail, the haze of fog too deep to see all the way to the blue line of the coast as he would have on a clear day.

Thought of the cottage. Of the shadow that passed across the girl’s face as his hand fell from her shoulder. Of the glimpse of the lovers in bed. Of feeling desperately detached from the life that they had built together and knowing he would only ever be a trespasser in the midst of that great love. Of being invited in anyway.

The Witcher took up the mare’s reins. Hesitated. Huffed out a resigned sigh.

And turned back toward the coast.

* * *

Her wards rippled.

The sky above the beach blazed blue and clear, and Yennefer watched the girl and her love wade along the edge of the water, Ciri wearing a pale yellow dress and a ridiculous floppy hat they had brought her from town and Julian with his trousers rolled above his calves and his tunic untucked. After a dreary few days the weather had suddenly tipped back into warmth as though summer would return, and their new family unit had been quick to take advantage.

She straightened the worn blanket and unpacked the picnic basket to lay out a platter of hard cheese and fruit and nuts alongside a bottle of wine. She waited, adjusted the little wooden platter, smiled as the girl ducked low to slap a spray of water Julian’s way with a sputter of indignation on his part.

They spotted him from a long ways off, the hunched figure leading the red mare.

Julian whooped and swung his arms in an exuberant wave, and Ciri tore off in a blink up the beach.

The Witcher caught her in a hug and spun with the momentum, Roach snorting beside him. Yennefer stood and dusted the sand from her gown. As she approached at a more reasonable pace alongside Julian, she reached to entangle their fingers.

Geralt’s grim expression seemed ill-suited to the sunny warmth of the day.

“Sorry,” he said. “I’m not great at-- I mean, I’m not-- I can be--”

“Stupid?” offered Yennefer.

“Slow on the uptake?” said Julian.

“Something like that,” said Geralt, and he shuffled forward, hesitated. Julian extended an arm, a flush high in his cheeks, and the Witcher clasped it, then swore under his breath and dragged him forward into an embrace. Face pressed into Julian’s neck and a big hand cupping the back of his head.

“Very touching,” said Yennefer. “Adorable.” But she lay a warm hand on his shoulder, and he stretched an arm around Julian to rest on her hip. “To what do we owe this pleasure, Witcher?”

“I do,” blurted the Witcher, his sharp eyes meeting hers. “I do desire it.”

“Oh,” breathed Yennefer. “ _Oh._ ”

“What?” said Julian.

“What?” said Ciri, nestling her way between the three of them.

“Later,” she said with a laugh. “Tell that to us again later, and I’ll explain.”

He nodded, as somber as the plague.

“Are you back for good?” asked Ciri, muffled in Geralt’s stomach. Yennefer rested her hand on her white-blonde head.

“He better be,” she said.

“He is,” said Julian.

“Yeah,” echoed Geralt. “He is.”

The four of them and the horse walked down the beach to settle around the picnic blanket. The crash of the waves and the cry of the gulls. Roach wuffling into Ciri’s hair to beg for slices of tart apple. Yennefer leaning against the Witcher’s arm as Jaskier leaned on his other side.

Her tendrils of magic reading something like _peace_. A sense of rightness.

_Home._


	30. Chapter 30

Nothing would settle as simply as all that.

Knowing this, Geralt yet allowed himself to sink into the moment, shutting off anything but sensory details. The crumble of the sharp cheese, the dry bite of the wine. The worn thread of the blanket stretched across the sand. The rhythmic beat of the waves. The call of seabirds.

The mage’s hand on his wrist. The bard’s forehead pressed against his shoulder. The girl’s laughter, clear and bright.

At last, their sunny picnic ended when a chill wind swept up off the water and drove the surf into sprays of foam against the scattered rocks on the beach. Their strange company scurried up the dunes to the shelter of the cottage just as a deluge of sleet began to fall.

That evening, the winter came on harsh and strong.

The rafters groaned with the howling wind, and the panes of the windows fogged as the four of them devoured a hearty meal of venison and cabbage stew and bread so flaky with butter it dissolved on their lips, washed down with a cask of heavy, dark ale.

Even Ciri was permitted a cup of watered drink, and her cheeks burned bright red even for the dilution. Jaskier balked when she began to hiccup and demanded she never be given a lick of booze again. The girl barely waited until the bard’s back was turned to sneak a few long pulls from his mug.

It certainly _felt_ simple enough.

The low dining table surrounded by patchwork cushions. The sleet rattling on the clay roof. The girl wearing a crooked smile. The couple pressing close together, Jaskier humming drunkenly with his lips against her temple, Yennefer trying to bat him away but laughing all the while.

And, most baffingly of all, Yennefer kept a hand on Geralt’s thigh most of the night. Jaskier looked his way over Yennefer’s shoulder to grin anew, as though as pleased to see him as he had been on the beach all over again.

With Ciri finally shooed off to bed, nodding asleep at the table, Geralt rose to find his legs shaky with the drink. Or it must have been the drink. The pair rose with him, dipping through the curtain that led to their darkened bedroom.

Geralt stilled at the threshold.

The sagging mattress in the barren spare room waited for him. He could go on to bed alone the same as he had any other night living here. He could lay awake and listen to their heartbeats settle. He could do a great many things that were simple and made sense and did not so deeply perplex him.

Instead, he allowed the pale hand that dipped back through the curtain to grab him by the arm and haul him forward and through and into their bed.

* * *

In the darkened loft above, a tipsy buzz rattling about in her skull, Ciri listened to the stilted conversation rising from the back bedroom and could not help but press a gleeful smile down into the blankets as she burrowed into them.

And promptly nestled them a bit more snugly around her burning ears and concentrated on allowing sleep to wash over her.

She knew what fucking sounded like, after all.

* * *

Long hours later, sprawled naked on his belly between the two of them in their bed, Geralt hovered on the fuzzy edge of sleep and listened to Yennefer and Jaskier murmur together, voices hushed with affection even as they bickered. He thought _what kind of wretched thing, am I? To deign to come between this?_

And in his exhaustion, he must have muttered some of that thought aloud, because suddenly their hands were in his hair, soothing through the tangled strands.

“No, Geralt,” Jaskier whispered. “No, darling. There was always a space for you.”

“You were already here,” said Yennefer. “Should have heard how often this little idiot brought you up.”

“You’re just as guilty as I, dear.”

Geralt grunted. Pressed his face down into the blankets so that they wouldn’t see whatever expression he wore.

Lips brushed against the crown of his head, their scents so muddied together he couldn’t tell whose.

Nothing should settle as simply as all that.

But settle it did.

* * *

“Geralt?” Jaskier asked as he tuned his lute at the head of the dining table. He was a verse and a half into mentally composing a ditty about a mad sorceress and a handsome bard and an utter fool of a witcher. “Why’d you come back?”

“Felt like it,” Geralt said with a shrug, eyes closed.

“Hold still,” said Ciri, her fingers slipping on the intricate braid she was working into his white hair. Beside them, Yen appeared lost in the book she was reading, but the subtle twitch of her lips betrayed her amusement.

“Come on,” he said. “You have to give me more to work with than that.”

Geralt cracked an eye open to regard Jaskier.

“You’re composing,” he said.

“No,” said Jaskier. “No, I’m simply reminiscing aloud. I’m asking with no creative motive attached.”

“Just answer the man,” said Yen without looking up from her book. “Or I’ll have to sit through you being pestered all evening.”

“My dearest Yennefer, you know you love my pestering. You crave my pestering.”

“I crave something, and it’s not your _pestering_.”

“Not in front of the girl,” grumbled Geralt, which earned him a tug on one of the intricate plaits along his temple.

“I’m not a baby,” said Ciri. “I won’t combust if I hear them flirting. If I did, I’d be long burnt to a pile of ash.”

Yennefer snorted.

“Anyway, back to the matter at hand,” said Jaskier. “Why did you turn around? Why come back?”

The Witcher sighed, long and put out. Blinked open his eyes again but kept his gaze locked on the ceiling, head tipped back into Ciri's fingers.

“Got cold,” he said. “Thought it would be warmer here.”

Jaskier strummed his fingers along the strings of his lute, not sure that that was the whole truth, but settling to compose the next few verses all the same.

The snow fell heavily across the landscape outside the windows, but inside, the little cottage was plenty warm indeed.

* * *

A breeze rustled through the sweet blossoms of the stone fruit tree in the garden, their boughs humming with insects freshly-roused from winter and errant petals scattering below.

The pair stood face to face beneath the tree, barefoot in the packed dirt, their hands clasped before them. Both dressed uncharacteristically plainly, Jaskier in an undyed tunic that fell to his thighs, ties loose at the open chest, and Yennefer in an off-white shift embroidered with subtle hints of lace.

A golden ribbon wrapped once around her wrist, once around his, and tangled together between their joined hands. The ends of the ribbon swayed in the warm breeze that whispered through the garden.

The wind mussed Jaskier’s brown hair across his forehead and loosened the curls in Yennefer’s raven locks. Their expressions reflected the same depth of fondness. A soft and subtle smile. An awed gleam in his eyes, a warm glint in hers.

 _How could anything like this be misunderstood?_ thought Geralt as he watched them, resting a hand on Ciri’s shoulder.

The hand-fasting ceremony was an ancient one, as mundane as it was magical.

Geralt knew they truly needed no witness to the vows they bowed close to make, hands entangled by the golden ribbon, but the pair had asked him all the same.

And what he witnessed was this:

_A binding. A promise._ _A choice._

* * *

Beneath the swaying boughs of the stone fruit tree, Yennefer felt in her bones that the dragon had been right.

No magic could restore her womb. Her desperate search would never have borne fruit. Some traumas hooked inside one like a barb, never to be torn free, except with accompanied evisceration.

She could never regain what had been taken. By Aretuza or by her life before or by the volatile twists of Fate that led her here.

But.

Julian’s hands burned warm in hers, a tangle of magic seeping over the entwined ribbon. The Witcher and the girl stood close by, entangled just the same.

For every boon, a sacrifice. Forces in the world never dissipating. For every action, an equal reaction.

She could imagine it, the scales tipped back in their direction. A balance of trauma and tragedy and potential joy, love, untold blessings.

She tightened her fingers around her lover’s palm, felt him squeeze back with equal firmness.

Perhaps, Yennefer thought, for all that she had lost, she had gained something even greater.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh no, and here we are at the end of this great and wonderful little story I've been lost in for the past month.
> 
> I'm endlessly grateful for the kind words here and elsewhere, and please know that I read every single comment even though I'm not excellent at responding and am especially grateful for those folks who have been here since the beginning leaving kind words every chapter.
> 
> I started this wee thing as something kind of silly and offhand, and I accidentally made a home in this tender, terrible little fic and there's nowhere else I would rather live, quite frankly! Building this world where Yennefer and Jaskier (hopefully) believably love each other very much has been a joy and a pleasure and a source of catharsis in these trying times, and I'm glad it has been that for a handful of folks as well and hope it can continue to be that for others.
> 
> This work is entirely un-betaed but many thanks to the many neat folks I stole teeny ideas here and there from. Love you Yennskier hoes. You make rolling around in this funky rarepair a hell of a good time. 
> 
> Just wait until the sequel wrecks all of your fragile little hearts in new and different ways. :)))

**Author's Note:**

> join me in the yennefer/jaskier pit over at [@limerental](limerental.tumblr.com) on tumblr


End file.
